New sound card...no sound

[El Monstero29]

Hello all

I just upgraded my rig last night from gigabyte 5850's x2 and the on board audio to an evga 670 4gb and a creative sound blaster fatality soundcard

For about 3 hours it was all running fantastically. Bf3 was running like a charm and I definitely noticed a difference in sound quality but then suddenly with no apparent reason I lost all sound, in game, in itunes, even the windows start up sound.

I tried switching back to the on board audio to see if my speakers had gotten messed up somehow but even then still no sound. I plugged my headphones into the front port with the same result

Before you ask yes I updated both the graphics card and sound card drivers. I didn't, however, update my mobo drivers because I'm not sure which ones TO update.

Could the mobo drivers be the problem? and if so why was it working perfectly for a few hours?

the mobo in question is a gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H

Any help would be much appreciated

 

[Z1NONLY]

Sudden failure while in use would seem to indicate some sort of component failure.

There's no harm in trying new drivers and such, (just create a restore point first) but I doubt your drivers suddenly became incompatible in the middle of playing a video game.

I suppose it's possible that the motherboard "learned" to route audio through the card and didn't "relearn" audio out the original ports if/when the audio card failed. (A CMOS reset would probably fix that scenario)

However, my best guess is a problem with the motherboard.

If the motherboard did fail, I would suspect that a power supply problem may have caused the MB failure.

My suspicion stems from the assumption that routing audio through a sound card doesn't particularly "stress" a motherboard and thus shouldn't cause it to fail.

Connecting two GPU's to a power supply can, however, stress a power supply and some power supplies do very bad things under stress. Ripple and noise can get introduced to your components and then they can fail.

....Now I feel like Fire Marshal Bill.

 

[El Monstero29]

Device manager says everything is running properly

Although I just noticed that I now have 3 separate sound devices:

Realtek
Nvidia
Creative SB X-Fi

I disabled nvidia and realtek but to no avail....

 

[El Monstero29]

Well I doubt its my PSU simply because I used to have 2 gpu's on it with no problems. And now I have a much more efficient gpu on it. Its a 750watt

You think maybe the sound card itself failed? the little white X-fi light is still lit up though

But that still doesn't answer why the ONBOARD audio no longer works. I thought maybe my speakers crapped out on me but like i said my headphones won't work anymore either and they are brand new

 

[Z1NONLY]

I have only had onboard audio fail once, and it was the motherboard.

 

[El Monstero29]

Alright I suppose I can try this CMOS reset but honestly I have no idea what that is haha I'm pretty noobish when it comes to this stuff

 

[Z1NONLY]

If you can't find a reset button on the motherboard or the jumper, just pull the power cord from your power supply, remove the watch battery and leave it out for a bit, (Might as well remove the suspect audio card while you wait) then reinstall the battery and power cable.


When you turn your computer on, the motherboard should now be at all default settings.

 

[boju]

In playback devices set your realtek speakers as default, it should have a green tick. Use the speaker outputs at the back of your computer to rule out if the front panel audio out hasnt been wired to the sound card instead.

Not sure whether you tried onboard sound after installing sound card though check your bios and make sure by installing the sound card hasn’t disabled onboard sound automatically.

 

[El Monstero29]

Ok thanks man you've been a HUGE help

but one last question is that going to mess with the drivers on my gpu?

 

[Z1NONLY]

Ok thanks man you've been a HUGE help

but one last question is that going to mess with the drivers on my gpu?

The drivers are in windows, so the BIOS shouldn't change those.

 

[El Monstero29]

That's a relief

I'll let you know if this works

Thanks again

 

[El Monstero29]

Best answer selected by El Monstero29.

 

[El Monstero29]

Ok it would seem that CMOS reset did the trick but I'm not going to let my guard down for a few days since it was working fine last night too...

Anyways thanks Z1nonly and boju both of you were very helpful *internet hug*