"Pen" wrote
in t:
What you need to do is read page 3-15 of the manual
which has the pin connections for the FPI 02 header,
which is where your connections are. The left and
right outputs are on 2 pins each.

The mic goes to 1 hot, 2 gnd.
Left to 9 and or 10
Right to 5 and/or 6
Audio low to pin 11 ground.


As Kony pointed out, I pretty much figured out the header pins. There
are 4 pins: leftside "left", rightside "left", leftside "right", and
rightside "right". That is, the header has 2 pins for "left" and 2 pins
for "right". Yet with the audio jack, cable, and mini-plug on the end
of the cable, there are only 3 conductors: tip, middle, rear
(ground/shield).

The 2 "left" pins on the header are shorted by a jumper. Same for the 2
"right" pins. So how do I wire 3 conductors from the audio cable
mini-plug to 4 pins on the mobo header? Even if the audio jack on the
front panel were a NC (normally closed) switch, which it is not,
attaching one conductor to the left, another to the right, and the
ground/shield to the ground-side pins for left and right would end up
shorting them all together, and I doubt left and right are supposed to
get shorted together.

I've done some ohmic testing and found none of the 2 left and 2 right
pins on the mobo header are connected to the ground pin in that same
header. So it's not that there are 3 pins, one for left, one for right,
and the other 2 are just ground pins. There are 4 pins and none of
which are ground. So it seems that I'd need a headphone jack that had 4
conductors (or maybe 5 where one is the ground/shield) where the 2
conductors for the left channel must be shorted and the 2 conductors for
the right channel are shorted when no headphones are plugged into the
jack which then open to connect to the headphones, but headphones also
only have 3 conductors. Do headphone jacks have 4 conductors, 2 for
left (tip) and 2 for right (collar), plus maybe a 5th for the
ground/shield?

Plus the audio jack isn't a normal headphone jack (although I might be
able to replace it with one) but instead just passes the connections
straight through. I suspect that I am supposed to push it into the
line-out (front speaker) jack on the sound card which merely moves that
jack physically from the rear of the case to the front. But they I'd
have to use a Y adapter to hook up the speakers, the speakers wouldn't
cut out when I plug in the headphones into the front jack, and it would
end up with 2 sets of speakers on the line-out jack (the speakers and
the headphone speakers).

I was hoping someone that used the mobo front-panel header, especially
if for an Abit NF7-S, had figured out how to hook them up to an audio
jack on the case's front panel. Or to find out if Abit was stupid in
providing effectively an audio extension cord instead of a real
headphone jack. I can run the mic cable out through the back to the mic
jack on the sound card since the purpose would be to simply make it
easier to plug and unplug the mic from the front. I really don't want
to just move the [front] speaker connection to front but really wanted a
headphone jack capability. It looks like Abit designed this front panel
header to be used ONLY with their Abit Media XP Pro kit that fits in and
consumes a 5-1/4" drive bay. So I might get forced into getting it. It
was pricey at newegg.com for $63 but a link at Abit took me to
excaliberpc.com where it is $25. Guess I'll have to can the idea of
hooking up the mobo headers for audio to the audio jack to the case
front.

It is misleading for Abit to claim to provide a front-panel header for
audio when all they really provided was a specialized header just for
their own product. It should not have been called a front panel header
but instead called an Abit Media XP Pro Kit header. For other users
that have cases with front panel audio jacks, do you have wires with
2-pin headers to connect to mobo pins or do you also have an audio
cable?