Front Panel Audio Connected but not working, why?

Twiggy1995 · March 16, 2020

Hi,

So some of you may have seen a couple of my other posts regarding my father's old computer from 2009 I recently upgraded and turned into a decent gaming machine for the late 2000's, as a fun project.

Anyways, it runs pretty good, and I chalk up the issues with Saints Row 2 to the game itself with it being notorious for being horribly optimized.

One issue I have always had was an issue with things on the front panel, at the top of the case in a 5.25 bay, is a combo multi card reader, two usb ports, and mic and headphone ports. All the card readers work fine, as do the two usb ports.

However the headphone and microphone jacks do not seem to work at all. My motherboard is an Asus P5KPL-AM SE, I went and read the motherboard manual and then I made sure the front panel audio was connected properly (which it was) and I disconnected and reconnected it firmly to be sure, but still nothing.

Back when I first reinstalled XP SP3 after erasing the hard drive with DBAN, I went and got all the drivers for the motherboard off of Asus' website (it's still on there) including for the on-board Realtek HD Audio, and it does work, all the audio ports on the back work just fine.

Nothing in the manual mentioned special software for the front panel audio, so from my understanding, since it is properly connected and the proper drivers for the on-board audio are installed, it should work. So I don't know what the problem may be.

Is there something I am missing, or is it the case, that the jacks, or the cable, or the header are just "bad"?

ShearMe · March 18, 2020

This troubleshooting guide might help you nail down the problem:

Twiggy1995 · April 1, 2020

On 3/18/2020 at 3:46 PM, ShearMe said:

This troubleshooting guide might help you nail down the problem:

Thanks you for the link.

Sorry for the long time to reply.

I think I have narrowed down the issue, I suspect that either the audio connector on the board is bad, or that it is for a different type than the front panel is.

What I mean is that either the connector is bad, or it's a connector for HD Audio, while the front panel may be AC'97.

When I went into my BIOS and changed it from HD Audio to AC'97, the headphone port works (but still no microphone), when it's set to HD Audio, nothing works. Unfortunately, I do not have a spare computer to remove the front panel audio from and then plug into this one to see. However being that I don't record anything, I really only need the headphone port working, which I have now. So, not a proper solution, but it does do what I need it to do now. Hopefully in future I will be able to test it and see what specifically it is.