goodsound
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 25, 2005
- Posts
- 290
- Likes
- 11
just bought a Audigy 2 NX USB soundcard was quite surprised to find that it runs pretty hot!(temperature). Does your's too ?? Afterall how much power could a little card consume ? The tiny adapter is rated at 5V 1.5A . So I decided to find it out myself and was even more surprised to find a current drain in the order of 900ma!
Thats almost 5W of power! That got me curious and the covers came off right away. I wanted to see what produces so much heat and consumes so much power.
Right off the bat I noticed that near the DC input was a little inductor (L1) that was the hottest thing on board, followed by a regulator(LD33 - probably a 3.3v reg). Not only that, a pair of filter caps right after the inductor were running hot too(that doesn't sound very good).
Besides that, another regulator (LD18 - probably a 1.8v reg) somewhere else on the board was relatively warm too.
But the chip that caught my attention was the Sigmatel codec. I didn't expect that one to be so hot. Other chips were noticeably warm to touch if not hot.
Here's a list of all major chips I found on board.
Sigmatel STAC9460S - Codec
JRC 4556A - Headphone output
ST MC33078 - Line level output/input dual opamp. Total 4.
Philips UDA1334 - Low Power DAC
Philips ISP1581BD - USB device controller
Creative CA0186 - DSP
Cirrus Logic EP7309 - High-Performance, Low-Power System-on-Chip Enhanced Digital Audio Interface
ST M29W400BB - 4Mbit Flash Memory
ST LD33 - 3.3v regulator (?)
ST LD18 - 1.8v regulator (?)
What still intrigues me is that these chips are not power mongers, in fact they are 'low-power' devices yet they manage to draw that much current all together!
These chips are very typical in portable players and I have yet to come across one that runs so hot.
Does that sound normal ? Do you think something's not right ?
Thats almost 5W of power! That got me curious and the covers came off right away. I wanted to see what produces so much heat and consumes so much power.
Right off the bat I noticed that near the DC input was a little inductor (L1) that was the hottest thing on board, followed by a regulator(LD33 - probably a 3.3v reg). Not only that, a pair of filter caps right after the inductor were running hot too(that doesn't sound very good).
Besides that, another regulator (LD18 - probably a 1.8v reg) somewhere else on the board was relatively warm too.
But the chip that caught my attention was the Sigmatel codec. I didn't expect that one to be so hot. Other chips were noticeably warm to touch if not hot.
Here's a list of all major chips I found on board.
Sigmatel STAC9460S - Codec
JRC 4556A - Headphone output
ST MC33078 - Line level output/input dual opamp. Total 4.
Philips UDA1334 - Low Power DAC
Philips ISP1581BD - USB device controller
Creative CA0186 - DSP
Cirrus Logic EP7309 - High-Performance, Low-Power System-on-Chip Enhanced Digital Audio Interface
ST M29W400BB - 4Mbit Flash Memory
ST LD33 - 3.3v regulator (?)
ST LD18 - 1.8v regulator (?)
What still intrigues me is that these chips are not power mongers, in fact they are 'low-power' devices yet they manage to draw that much current all together!
These chips are very typical in portable players and I have yet to come across one that runs so hot.
Does that sound normal ? Do you think something's not right ?
