Front audio - case is AC97, board is HD

[WalkinTarget]

Ran into this bug yesterday at work after spending hours trying to get the front audio ports working in a lab at work ... we bought 150 PCs from a local vendor and the case apparently is an older design that offers only an AC97 front port cable option when plugging into the mainboard.
The board is an Intel 945 design that offers HD audio, so I had their tech in to look at it yesterday, and he initially said that it was a driver issue that he could resolve. Well, after 45 minutes he gave up on th software side of things and looked closer, and then found the hardware discrepancy.

So I don't know how they will be handling it .. he is coming in within the hour with an HD front port and cable to test it .. but my co-workers and I don't feel we should have to foot the bill for 150 cables and front ports for these cases.

Any thoughts ?? I really hate disputing a large purchase, but if you bought a car with power windows and found at pickup that they didn't work, as the windows only worked with a newer car chassis that had the correct wiring internally from the factory, would you be a little ticked off ?

[Trooper110]

Well, if they claimed that the front panel audio would work with it, I think you have a case. If you didn't do any research in to it, I think it would be nice if they would foot the bill, but I think they'd be perfectly within rights telling you to bugger off.

[WalkinTarget]

They have in fact decided its something they will fix. They treat us well, and we buy a lot of PCs from them. Interestingly enough, the AUDIO port works, but the mic itself does NOT !! He brought an HD front panel along with him to test, and that worked fine.
We tried rewiring the pins on the AC97 end to match the Azalia end, but there are two more wires on that end, an orange and gray wire which I assume would be the missing mic support.
Our vendor is now going to call Compucase (the case manuf.) and see if they can help him out with what can be done, but our vendor is already planning on touching all 147 PCs at this point.

[Trooper110]

Very nice, glad you're getting the support WT

[Duke{CLR}]

It sounds like you are an the way to a happy ending.

[Trooper110]

It sounds like you are an the way to a happy ending.

I think that depends on the the tech that they send Duke

[WalkinTarget]

LoL, now Troop, don't go there !!! Their tech went to the engineers and explained it, and their experience matches our exactly. He also offered up why this happened. They had been buying from the case vendor directly, and at some point early last year the model # of the case changed slightly, with no clue on their end WHY it changed.
So we appear to be the first customer to find this out, and they now know WHAT changed in the case design. But we are now sampling the cases from five different buildings to determine if ALL of our cases are the models with the incorrect front panel. So far all of them are, so I'm sure it affects all of our PCs, but we only NEED to make a lab of 23 PCs work before school ends this year, then deal with the other 124 over the summer.

[Dead...Again]

I thought you could usually specify in BIOS that you were using an AC97 Front Panel instead of HD... Maybe not.

[WalkinTarget]

Dead, I actually read that was an option, apparently on newer boards, but the 945 intro'd the Azalia/HD audio, and it wasn't an option from within the BIOS.
I'm learning quickly what the problem is, and believe me, its fairly widespread after doing some googling, and it isn't easily correctable unless you have a front port audio cable with both an AC97 and an Azalia header on it.