Aurora R8, 850 watt PS and PCIe question

Hi Mike, sorry it took a while for the community to respond. Probably comes to show the number of audiophiles buying AW gaming desktops. Anyway, I am not an audiophile but I would like to chime in.

Ah... Creative. Been many years since I bought that that latest wavetable synthesis sound card and became the envy of the block.

First, there are 2 makers of 850W Dell OEM PSU, Delta and Huntkey. There used to be problems with the Huntkey and since I don't have that, I cannot confirm if it is 80 Bronze or not. The Delta however, is 80 Bronze, as shown on the label of the PSU. To see that label though, you need to remove the screws holding the PSU to the swing out bracket. Be careful not to unscrew the ones holding the PSU cover as you never want to open up a PSU unless you are a pro. Once you detach the PSU, you can see on the side that was covered by the bracket the maker and whether it is 80 Bronze or not.

Would you be using this card to do a direct drive of your speakers? Or are you just using this as a pre-amp and you have a separate power stage that you plan to drive to from the card output? If it is the former, then you could be pretty near to the brink especially with the 2080 being > 200W TDP. Either way, I recommend that you head over to user forums for the AE-9 or equivalent hifi cards to read the feedback from users with similar expertise. Sorry, we're a bunch of GPU toasting, fan ramping, CPU cranking people here! 

Would you be using this card to do a direct drive of your speakers? Or are you just using this as a pre-amp and you have a separate power stage that you plan to drive to from the card output?

Punt that question. I just reread the page and looks like there's no way to bypass the push pull power amps. Let us know how it goes.

Thank you for the feedback,

To answer your questions, I would be using the card to go directly to a pair of KEF LSK speakers.   

According to the documentation that came with my PC the power supply is 

321-BDXJ : 850W EPA Bronze PSU Liquid Coo led Chassis

Does that help at all?

Thanks again

Mike

Yes, that should be the Delta Bronze PSU. I checked against my invoice:

321-BDXH 850W EPA Bronze PSU Liquid Cooled Chassis

Just a reminder to consider the CPU and GPU power draw that easily adds another 300W on heavy workload. Just comes as a surprise that you can put an R8 in the same room as your audio equipment and not get distracted by all the fan noise coming from it.

The other thing is that your Creative card will be sitting under the 2080 so expect some heat to flow between these 2 cards. The 2080 GPU is mostly CMOS logic gate circuit which just needs on-off signaling so it is going to be more heat tolerant than the analog circuits on the sound board. It's worth checking on audio forums on how these boards perform in terms of fidelity once heat comes into play.

The AE-9 gets its power through a 6-pin PCIe connector. Your 850W unit may have 8 pin connectors with 2 pin break away.

AE9 card

I was thinking that, I will probably just pick up an 8 to 6 pin adapter.   I'm feeling like I need to just open it up before hand so I know whether there is even an available cable to use.

Thanks

Mike

I went ahead and purchased the AE-9 card, and had no problem installing it.   What I ran into was that everytime I plugged in a USB 3 device into the computer I got a crazy hum going through my powered speakers.   The sound card was connected to the speakers with RCA jacks from the sound card to a 3.5 mm jack to the speakers using a shielded cable.

The hum was happening even with the computer turned off and unplugged.   Initially I heard using a powered anker usb hub then tried hooking a single hard drive directly with the hub and had the same problem.

Any idea what could cause that or what a solution could be ?  I returned the card for the time being, until I could do more research.   When I am using my external soundcard, I have no issues with a hum.

Thanks for any advice.

Mike