[Zoomastigophora]

There's signal noise in both the front audio jack and the rear audio jack. I have an Asus M3A79-T Deluxe motherboard using the integrated sound. The noise from the rear jack probably isn't reduceable since its directly linked to the motherboard, but I don't know. With the front jack though, there's only noise when the GPU is under load. At first I thought it was the PCIe power connectors interfering with the front audio cable, but after my latest attempt at recabling my computer's internals, I'm still getting noise. What's weird is that I managed to fix it a while ago by shifting some cables around, but after I went in to re-adjust my Corsair Dominator fan, the noise came back. Now I hear a faint high pitched whine with my headphones which is pretty annoying. It's inaudible if there's sound playing but if there is silence, I can hear it.

What I'm wondering is if there's anything I can do to fix this? If the recommendation is to buy a discrete sound card, which one?

 

[Vitor Machado]

You should consider a USB DAC/Amp.
Since it's external, it's supposed to be far from the computer case's R.F. interference.
And plus it'll improve sound quality from your, probably crappy, on-board audio.

Do a search for USB DAC and you'll find plenty stuff about them.

 

[Zoomastigophora]

How are DACs for gaming? Would a sound card likely suffer from same sort of interference?

I'm primarily concerned with getting rid of the line noise in the least expensive manner possible. I'm pretty happy with what the ATH-A500 give me and I'm a poor college student so cheapness takes priority over quality at this point.