A Closer Look

The FPIO2 header will be the focus of this mod guide. Many computer cases now come with two USB ports, a microphone jack and a headphone jack mounted on the front. For such cases, their USB ports are relatively easy to install. Just follow the pin orientation in the manual and you should be fine.

However, the microphone and headphone jacks are a mystery to install. How can one hook them up to the motherboard? As far as the ABIT NF7-series of motherboards is concerned, there is no way to install the microphone and headphone jacks!

Well, this is a problem this mod guide will solve. While this guide uses the ABIT NF7 motherboard as an example, you can easily adapt it to other motherboards as well.

Let's take a look at the FPIO2 header pins.

As you can see, pin 1 is the MIC (microphone) pin. There are also two Front Right pins (5, 6) and two Front Left connectors (9, 10).

There shouldn't be any confusion about the MIC connector but why are there two pins each for the Front Right and Front Left? To top it up, why did the ABIT NF7 motherboards come with jumpers covering pins 5 and 6 as well as pins 9 and 10?

The answer is simple. Pins 5 and 9 are the actual pins that deliver the sound signals to the Media XP while pins 6 and 10 are for the back panel speaker jack (green jack in the diagram below).

For the back panel to be able to provide sound output, a jumper must be set to pins 5 and 6 (for the right channel) and 9 and 10 (for the left channel). If the jumpers are not connecting those pins, then the back panel's speaker jack will be disabled.