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'ranking' bypassing the MoBo

Hi Bertel,

Since you PRACTICE (!) a lot of power supply improvements to the cMP2 setup, you might be able to shed some light on to the following question.

I would like to know the degree in (potential) sound quality improvement between: supply chain 2 and supply chain 3:

- Supply chain 1: original chain.
source: 5 volt ‘high quality power’ -> P24 5Volt input connector on MoBo -> MoBo to PCI -> circuit board of soundcard -> ‘sink’ components on soundcard (who need the supplied 5V)

- Supply chain 2: MoBo is bypassed.
source: 5 volt ‘high quality power’ -> circuit board of soundcard -> ‘sink’ components on soundcard (who need the supplied 5V).

- Supply chain 3: MoBo + (parts of) circuit board of soundcard are bypassed.
source: 5 volt ‘high quality power’ -> ‘sink’ components on soundcard (who need the supplied 5V)

I realise that it’s very hard to communicate about sound quality improvements in words, but I still would like too get an impression by description, because it’s better than no communication at all. May be it’s helpful to rank sound quality improvements as I (subjectively) experience them in my setup. I would scale/index them very ROUGHLY like this:
- linear PSU on P4: +90
- Low resistance wire (6AWG or similar) from linear PSU to both P4 and picoPSU/P24: +90 (*)
- Linear PSU on 12 volt rail on P24 through (specific) picoPSU model: +30
- smoothing caps on a switching ATX PSU: +20
- combined optimizations: XP, Kernel and BIOS: +15 <-> + 20
- various releases of cPlay - 2 <-> +4

Is it possible to say where in the above ranking roughly would be:
- by passing the MoBo (chain 2) with ‘high quality power’ from a linear PSU?

I don’t like soldering to my Lynx AES16 or Lynx L22 sound card. But I think I can manage to bypass the MoBo (with help of a PCI riser-card or something. don’t know yet)


(*)
Untill now no other inmates tried out or gave feedback on changing 18AWG wire between a linear PSU and the P4 / P24 for a wire type with much less resistance (6AWG or similar).
Probably many inmates consider me being an honoured member of ‘the ministry of silly tweaks’. :-) But I’m far from that. If I hadn’t tried it myself, I would be very much in favour of Ryelands comments on it. Http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=pcaudio&n=54333&highlight=sums+Ryelands&r=
But because you suggested I decided to give it a try. So thank you for the suggestion, because it made (very much too my surprise !! ) a very big improvement.

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