"CD In" Port on MB?

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EmmaBug03

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#1 EmmaBug03
Member since 2006 • 237 Posts
The MB Manual says to plus the audio cable that came with the DVD drive to this port. My DVD Drive was OEM. Came without any cables. It is SATA. I have it plugged into the SATA port and into the PS. Is that all I need?
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matrixian

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#2 matrixian
Member since 2003 • 624 Posts
That audio cable isn't necessary, i've never used one.
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Marfoo

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#3 Marfoo
Member since 2004 • 6006 Posts
This is if you want you optical drive to read a CD, convert it to analog, then send the analog signal over to your onboard sound. If you don't have the cable though, Windows will just extract the digital data and the soundcard will will deal with it there. No one uses these anymore, but they used to be necessary with older operating systems and audio devices.
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codezer0

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#4 codezer0
Member since 2004 • 15898 Posts
The "audio cable" (if it's the 4-pin one) that is referred to here is so that drives that could output their audio in analog format could use this cable as a shortcut to reduce the relative burden of passing that data over the IDE cable. Newer IDE drives also had a 2-pin audio cable for SPDIF out support. Nowadays, newer chipsets are efficient enough where all the audio can pass over IDE (or in your case, SATA) without needing that dedicated cabling; but if you've got it, I'd say use it anyway. It won't hurt anything, and in the best case, you'll get better audio output from it.