So much noise coming out of the front headphone jacks

Since a while back, I had been plugging in the headphones to the headphones port on the Logitech Z623 speakers. I could not remember why I did that. Yesterday I mistakenly plugged them into the front headphones ports and then I remembered why.

Noise!

There is a massive noise inserted into the audio signal when I plug them to the front headphones port. I checked if I could fix it by disabling the mic port for example. It was already disabled.

It has to be the front audio cable or the port of the case. I am definitely not using a dedicate audio card, but the onboard – actually it is not on-board – that comes with the Asus Maximus VII Gene is no slouch. That is one of the reasons I picked this board over the other Micro-ATX boards, because I would not need to buy a dedicated audio card.

Since there is no problem when I listen to the headphone through the port on the speakers which are, by the way, connected to the ports on the same audio “card”. Like I said, it is not on-board, it is a separate solution that plugs into a proprietary slot on the motherboard. And my headset definitely isn’t the culprit as it is a audiophile grade headset, the AudioTechnica ATH-AD500X and again, it works well when plugged through the speakers.

It is not a big deal. I just want to let others who are looking to buy the Silverstone SG09/SG10 cases that there might be a problem with the front audio ports. YMMV obviously. I had issues with the front audio ports of the Raven RV03 as well, but instead of noise, they did not make the headphone jack stick inside. It was always loosen up. Bad, Silverstone, bad!

Gentle Typhoon D1225C12B7AP-29 (with the KÜHLER 620) – there is nothing Gentle about that airflow NOR noise

Ever since I bought the fan controller, I had been considering buying the Gentle Typhoon AP29 fan for the Antec KÜHLER 620 radiator. The fan I was using, the Scythe Kama Flow 2 1900RPM model, was reasonably quieter and slightly underperforming compared to the stock Antec fan. But I wanted to see if I could improve the KÜHLER 620’s performance by adding a high speed fan. Tests performed at SilentPCReview was showing that the KÜHLER 620 was only 1C warmer than the 920 if same fans were used. KÜHLER 920 has two fans and  those fans ran at a very high RPM (hence intolerable noise at full blast). So my idea was to buy fans that were on par or better than the stock 920 fans.

I started with one AP29 fan. The noise rating meant that the AP29 was only 3dB louder than the Kama Flow 2. That means, a single AP29 should be as loud as two Kama Flow 2’s. (+3dB means doubling noise, in case you were wondering)