Butt Shaker Part 2:
I do not have a dedicated sound card for my PC. What I've been doing is using a USB to power and send audio signal to my wireless headset. My motherboard has outputs that send audio to a pair of small desktop speakers. If I plug my USB in for the headset, it disables output to my external speakers. Since most of my racing is online where I use a mic, this has worked out fine for me: I have a pair of dinky desktop speakers for watching youtube and I just plug in my headset's USB unit when I'm racing online.
The shaker setup requires its own sound card. For reasons SimVibe explains, it cannot use a USB add-on sound card due to potential latency issues. I wanted to keep my external speakers that are powered by my MB so I picked up a new Sound Blaster sound card.
Here's the card. It's a PCIE card. I believe you can tell by the two small connectors at the bottom that will plug into the MB:
Here's my MB. You can see the correctly sized slot for the sound card (circled in yellow), but it's completely covered up by my large video card and is not accessible. The slot circled in red is the only one available. It appears that's a PCI slot, not PCIE so the card above doesn't look to be able to work.
So I need a PCI sound card, right? Well, I called around town and finally found a store that had one last PCI sound card in stock so I picked it up. It's a SoundWave 5.1 card. I got it installed and it wouldn't get recognized by Windows. In my search to figure out what's wrong I found out it's not compatible with Windows 10, which is what I run. :evil: Now I've got a 2nd sound card that I can't use!!
In order to get my shakers operational, I made the decision to remove the new card and connect the shakers/amp to my MB's internal sound card, leaving my external speakers with no signal. My USB output feeds my headset. The downside to this is my external speakers do nothing now. So if I want to watch any videos or anything with sound on my PC, I've got to wear my headset. That sucks and I'm not happy about it so I want to come up with a better solution and I'd really appreciate some input from those who are more PC savvy than me!
Here's my options as I see it:
1) Get an adpater to put my PCIE sound card into a PCI slot. I see that these adapters exist, but no idea how good they are. They look like they would also raise the card and I'm not sure how that would affect the location of the card at the back of the case. Not sure if these would also cause a compatibility issue with Win10?
2) Get a USB sound card expander (or whatever it's called) and use it for my external speakers. I would just have to hope that it doesn't cause any kind of compatibility issues with SimVibe. If this works, I'd ultimately like to get one that has 5.1 surround so I could add 4 speakers and a sub.
Any other suggestions?