Ok, this is not supremely vue related, although it is related to the use of my system with vue, among other things and is driving me nuts. I have a Gateway 831GM. 3Ghz, Pentium 4, 3GB RAM, 600GB HDD Radeon X850XT Graphics Adaptor Two DVD drives. Sound card...nondescript default! I want to upgrade the sound card so that it can handle music creation, synthesis and playback well. Unfortunately, the video card and fan seem to take up so much space that the remaining free slot inside the tower cannot be accessed. It's a good video card, so I don't really want to change it. Can anyone think of / does anyone know a workaround for this, without having to cannibalise my system within an inch of its life, or get a second computer simply for the music side of things (since I might want to integrate music with vue animation anyway, I am not sure that two computers is that wonderful of an idea, apart from the expense).

Hi, I rencently bought a Creative 'X-Fi" sound card for making my Camtasia (live screen animations), voice instruction, Vue video tutorials. I like it and it saved me the cost of a new microphone with a higher output signal (my old cheap mics work great now).

Seems to me your best hope is if the fan is the type that mounts in a PCI slot. If so, you could probably remove it and add a fan elsehere.

But if it was that easy, you likely would have already thought of that.

My experience as a PC consultant dealing with some overheating motherboards, is that a fan mounted such that it blow INTO the case, and located to blow directly onto the hotest motherboard area is the most effective.

You can buy fans that go into the 5 1/4" drive bay openings as well (if your 2 DVD drives leave any open bays).

There are some pretty ingenious fan solutions out there, so do some web research. Antec and Adaptec market several.

If what is in your way is a fan DUCT, you might be able to hack into that and re-direct it somewhat.

Another idea would be to shop for audio cards based on size and buy the smallest - if that would let you squeeze it in.

A water cooling solution is probably too expensive and too hard to fit into a Gateway.

HTH

_ jc...'Art Head Start' e-book
.......'Art Head Start.com site Digital Art skills. Free lighting chapter, tutes, Vue models, tex pix.

jc, thanks for the help. To clarify, it seems to be a fan specifically associated with the "video" board...not the main compartment fan. This (video board?) fan hangs off the board about an inch and prevents anything going into one remaining slot. AAArrgh! it is so frustrating that I can't do something simple like upgrade a sound card!

I see, and if it's a video card, it's probably in a special slot, so it can't be moved. Poor mechanical design. That's one of the reason i always assemble my own machines - to get more slots on the motherboard and use only the components i like. Sorry, don't know what else to suggest, unless you replace the video card. There might be an external sound card available, but not very likely.

Well looking at that system online I see it only has 2 pci slots. Ouch. What is in the second slot?

Can the audio system in there not do all the music features you want? Ie is there a specific kind of sound input / output port you are looking for?

Take a look at the external Audigy 2 unit that Creative offers. the only interface is through the USB port (although I do believe it requires USB 2), and has audio standard connectors, so you can feed into an actual stereo system.

hi guys. The tower as stands seems to have zero midi capability, and no "asio", another sound standard which I require (there is an "asio4all", but it isn't much good). It's got plenty of USB slots, so maybe I can use midi there, but that remains to be seen. The lower slot seems to be occupied by the (controller?)...attached by ribbon to hard drive platofrm and the HDDs. The upper slot appears to be vacant, but is greatly overhung by the video card and its fan, which seems to be in a special (black) slot above it. This, as best as my descriptions allow, is what I see in there. The guy at comp USA said I could swap to some other kind of hard drive, and move things around, but that sounds heavily cannibalistic.

Dale, I'm not sure I'm understanding you. How would I attach this to the motherboard? Or are you talking about a completely external unit, if there is such a thing?

Dale,(update) sorry, I see the one you were referring to now. Unfortunately, for sure, it seems to have no asio capability, and I'm not sure it has midi even. Is this the only such external unit that exists?

I do think the Audigy 2 supports midi and asio drivers. What you really need to check for is the possiblities to plug in instruments or samplers, recording devices such as dat tapes and so on, and also check that it's compatible with the software you intend to use. It all really depends on how far you need to go with your music editing. I would say that an usb audio card must be checked for instant playback possiblilities, with the minimum latency, which may be a lot longer than with pci cards. But seems to be your only choice, due to your video card.

Attached Link: http://www.soundblaster.com/resources/read.asp?articleid=53937&cat=3

Probably a quick and inexpensive fix is to buy a new tower for your components. They can be very inexpensive and you can buy one that will allow for lots of expansion in the future. For less than 100 you can fix your cramped space issue and still use it for years to come with any upgrades.

Just buying a new case won't help. The mainboard still has only 2 PCI slots, one of which is blocked by the graphics card fan. You'd need a new mainboard too. A fully external Audigy 2 is probably the easiest solution. Another thing is that controller card connected to the drives. Do you have your drives in a RAID array, is that it? That would be an explanation for the presence of that card. If that's the case, you could opt for breaking the RAID array and plugging the drive cables into the ATA slots on the mainboard. Then the controller card isn't needed anymore and you can replace it with a good sound card. On the other hand, if the mainboard has only parallel ATA connectors (standard on older mainboards) and your drives are Serial ATA, you have a problem - then you NEED that controller card and the only viable option is an external USB audio card.

You ain't gonna get a sound card in there, so you need to look for an external system that connects via USB or FireWire. Yes, you need ASIO and MIDI.

There are loads of these on the market. M-Audio have a good reputation.

http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family

Maybe consider getting an all in one Keyboard / Audio / Midi ?

Thanks for the comments guys. Svdl...yes that sounds like roughly what they were suggesting in the shop, or something like it, although they seemed to be talking about transferring the data across onto a new drive? cspear...Yes, I'm a bit confused though as to what they call an "interface" amd what is actually an external audio card. Certainly, I want to make sure that all of this is going to work right with software music programs...recording and playing with multiple tracks. Ideally, also being able to use view on the same computer, so that I can correlate audio and visual, and not have to have a super-weird workflow bust out across two machines...