Hello! I am a newbie at this.. my husband and I are looking to add a sound card to his Dell Dimension 9200. He is very impressed with the D series. However, there is one problem I just can't figure out, so I am hoping someone here can help. Our Dimension motherboard has a 4 pin, 8 pin, and 6 pin PCI-E slots, but our 16 pin (Or whatever it is) slot is taken up with a Nvidia 8600 GT graphics card. My husband likes the idea of the X cards, because they are on the PCI - E slot, while the D2 is a PCI.

1) will either of the DX or D2X cards fit on the 4 pin slot of the PCI -E? the Nvidia 8600GT card is quite big, and I have no idea if the sound card will fit there.... additionally, I don't know if heat will be an issue, as the sound card would be right on top of the video card, without much space for heat release.

2) with the D2 card, if my husband is doing FLAC or other bandwith intensive stuff, will the PCI bottleneck at all?

3) Is there a lot of difference in sound quality between the DX and D2 card? My husband's research says that there might be some difference, but I don't have a clue if the difference is big or not.[font=Arial]

That will probably be an issue. From what I have read online, the D2X needs a PCI-E x1 slot - which is fine. If your motherboard is anything like mine, then one slot is under the graphics card heatsink and the other is right next to the card. I wouldn't put another card in either slot.

This D2X looks like poor value, too, at the prices I have seen quoted online.

No. What other 'bandwidth intensive' stuff do you have in mind? I would guess that gaming with accelerated audio is likely to be the most bandwidth intensive. While single lane PCI-e is two (or four for PCI-e 2.0) times faster than PCI, I don't see PCI being the bottleneck.

As far as I know, you may install a PCIE 1x card into ANY PCIE slot (1x, 4x, 16x, ...), just some portion of the motherboard slot will not be used. In fact, all the slots are the same, just the x4 one is cut off and the x1 is terminated in addition (so you can't put a x2+ card into it).
Even a simple PCI slot has bandwidth over 100 MB/s. A 192kHz, 24-bit, 5 channel uncompressed PCM audio needs just 2.75 MB/s.

The only scenario where a PCI bus may fail (bandwidth-wise) are 1G/10G ethernet cards or perhaps some full HD uncompressed video (tuner/capture card).

Sorry, I forgot to clarify. The 16x PCI-E is the middle of the three PCI-E slots, so that there is a 4 pin on top, then the 16 pin, then the 8 pin. The fan for the graphics card is on top, and it's quite high, so I have been worrying about whether or not the sound card would even fit in the slot... if it did, I think, even with the low profile thing attached, it would be sitting literally on top of the fan.

I do wonder too, at having the extra power going to the card.. we'd have to get a cable to go off of a cable in the computer that looks to be already split, and having so many splits on the same power source bothers me.

Would the PCI card (the D2) have any bottleneck problems compared to the D2X or DX? My husband said that the X cards were like SATA, they had their own power and not working together on the same bus, while the PCI card would be sharing the width with any other PCI card that was installed (We have none at the moment).


We don't game on the computer, but my husband does record onto the computer, and sometimes edits the music, so a good quality sound card is a must.. besides, he's the audiophile, and I want to get him a good sound card.

Thanks for the help!