Photo Session
The four pin Molex power plug powers the whole of the card, I assume. I’m not entirely sure that the molex connector powers the entire card or just the sensitive audio portions of the card. However, the idea being that power coming directly from the switching power supply is much cleaner than the power coming from the PCI-Express bus. Again, backed by our listening tests, this design works very well.
Headphone DAC chores are handled by a 2-channel Wolfson WM8741, which is an older chip, but still offers very high performance, and certainly well suited for the electrically noisy environment it lives. The opamp is a high-quality TI LM4562NA, which is soldered directly to the board. You can upgrade the Of course, rounding out the analog section are Nichicon MUSE capacitors, everywhere.
DSP and native PCIe support are handled by the Cmedia CM8888 chip. I haven’t seen a PCI-PCIe bridge chip in audio cards for a long time, and while they functioned perfectly fine, I won’t be shedding a tear in their absence. The 7.1 outputs on the daughter card are handled by a CM9882 codec chip.