hey dood,
the two loose wires are the spdif connector. You can attach it to your mainboard or sound card and then get sound over your hdmi output.
An external power supply has nothing to do with a spinning fan or not. The PCIe interface can deliver up to 75 watt without external power. Thats sufficient enough to run every card and fan in 2d mode. If supported because some cards wont boot up with enough power for 3d. But your card is a very very low end (almost over the sea so far away is the end
) so thats not an issue here.
If you have enough space in your pc you can just attach a 80mm or 120mm fan to your gpu heatsink and power it over the mainboard or by your psu. Simple cable clips will do the trick.
a 9300 is so much low power that even full passive it shouldnt exeed about 80°C. Maybe your heatsink is loosened to and has not full contact to the gpu die.
That's just confusing. Having Googled about I can see you are right, Vogel, but why on earth do these things exist? PCIe cards are more than capable of getting their audio stream in with their video stream without the need for a soundcard bridge. In fact that is one o their purposes and the reason they enabled PCs to have HDMI outputs in the first place.
Having the extra cables there to link into a sound-card offers functionality that is already part of the card and its driver. It's like having an extra SATA cable on a HD to carry JPGs or something. Most odd...
Anyway - moot point by the sounds as it looks like Relentless' PC goose is now well and truly cooked =(
EDIT: I get it. On the 9XXX series of cards AMD were too damned cheap to put the audio decoder chip on, thus the need for it to have a bridge to the sound-card. Interesting.
EDIT 2: As a side note I installed SpeedFan for fun and realised that my north-bridge was iddling at 52C, which was too high. Quick case clean and a fan modded onto the sink and its dropped a pleasing 15 degrees. So, thatnks for bringing this up is my point. I'd not have installed SpeedFan otherwise