Another successful mxm upgrade

I picked up a Shuttle XPC X100 on ebay for ~$40 shipped. For those of you unfamiliar the shuttle PC is built off of the same Uniwill platform that the Alienware m57xx & m55xx uses. Looking inside the case you will find the same motherboard, a similarly designed heatsink, and many other familiar components. I wanted a light weight HTPC and since I already had a ton of experience w/ my m5750 I wanted to check this little desktop out.

I first threw in my T7400 which I had laying around after upgrading my notebook to the T7600G. The next thing I wanted to replace was the ATI X1400. This card was weak back in 2006 and driver support ended years ago. When doings things such as streaming through the netflix / hulu apps this created problems as the old drivers did not support HDCP. I picked up an mxm type II Nvidia 8600M GT for a good price. I popped in the card and it worked great. Video from my DVI>HDMI cable without having to flash a new VBIOS, the latest Nvidia drivers at the time of this writing support the card, and all of the apps work great.

One problem I did have though was the TV was defaulting to HDMI audio instead of my 3.5mm>RCA cable even though audio over DVI/HDMI is unsupported with the older 8600M (yes I know newer Nvidia cards can do this). For some reason the pc was putting out an empty signal. There was no way to change the default on the LG tv and this room of the house does not have a receiver. There is an option in the Nvidia panel to disable HDMI audio but according to many other posts on the internet, this has been broken for 2+ yrs.

Read on if you are in this same boat and finding this post:

After searching many posts I found my solution. In short the TV's EDID needed to be edited in the windows registry to disable audio support. The site with the tutorial to do this was no longer around but using the wayback machine I was able to find the tutorial:

How to: Disable sound output over HDMI for nVidia graphics cards - currysauce.org

The only other problem I had was when using the second piece of software, the "Phoenix EDID Designer". I was given an error that the file I was trying to open was invalid. Googling some more I found that you need to convert the file from it's current format, into a format that Phoenix can read. I found a tool called "EDID_Converter" and after converting the file, finishing the tutorial, and rebooting the OS I had what I wanted. The 8600M working great, streaming my apps, retaining its HDCP link, and audio over the 3.5mm cable.

The only other thing to note is I soldered the heatsink fan to a constant source so it would always run 100%. The fan did not respond to the 8600M and though it would pop on when the CPU heated up I noticed the mxm card was getting hotter and hotter. The 8600M isn't known for its reliability so keeping it as cool as possible is needed. The fan at 100% is pretty much silent in the shuttle's case, and cannot be heard if the tv audio is going even on low.

All worked out in the end and I hope someone finds this helpful

 

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.!+1