Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2GB, not recognized as audio device?

[imay1280]

Hello all,

I'm hoping the fine folks here can give me some ideas... I have a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 2gb video card hooked to a Yamaha RX-V671 Receiver via HDMI to HDMI using a 1.4a cable. The video throughput works fine, but Windows 7 refuses to recognize the video card as an audio device. My "playback" menu tab is completely empty, after I disabled the on-board Realtek audio on my Gigabyte MB (thinking there may be a conflict).

I've trolled the boards a lot and have seen plenty of issues around the "not plugged in" problem, but very few addressing why Win7 doesn't want to admit that the 6950 can be a sound device, too.

I have checked video drivers, downloaded the latest Realtek audio ATI HDMI Audio Device Driver (error message that says something along the lines of "no supported drivers in this package"), and scoured message boards for hours. I'm hoping it's just some ID10T error and I can go about my business... Thanks in advance!

Oh, Win7 64-bit, running on a little older of a Phenom AM2 Quad-Core processor...

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

This topic has been moved from the section Windows 7 to section Graphics & Displays by SR-71 Blackbird

 

[imay1280]

I have now also switched PCIe slots, still no recognition of audio capabilities... =(

 

[jaguarskx]

Perhaps the audio drivers for the Radeon HD 6950 did not install properly or at all. That happened to me once. Even though I installed the complete Catalyst driver suite the audio driver was not installed. I just went to AMD's website to search only for the audio drivers for my Radeon HD 5850. That fixed the issue I had.

 

[imay1280]

Thanks for the reply... I tried re-re-installing the driver suite (as I couldn't find just an audio driver on either AMD or Sapphire's website) with no luck. A look into my device manager shows no unidentified devices, no errors, and (most disturbingly) no sound sub-tab at all (meaning, I assume, that it doesn't see anything wrong and also sees nothing resembling an audio device).

I'm at a total loss for other things to try, so please keep the ideas coming!

 

[imay1280]

So, a bit of an update... After reading a god-awful amount of threads and such, it seems there may be a combination of issues at work here.

First off: The handshake of HDMI seems to be at the root of several evils here, and I am trying to figure out what the correct order of turning on appliances should be to make sure that windows (now Windows 8, Pro, 64-bit) has a chance to see the connection and actually use it.

From there, if Windows doesn't recognize the HD audio, I can repeatedly uninstall/scan for hardware the 6950 Display driver and eventually the Radeon HD Audio Driver will populate with it. Sadly, it still doesn't seem to want to play sound but will at least appear on the Device Manager List.

Lastly, on the few occasions that I have the patience to do that, it still doesn't show up in the playback menu. Surely I can't be the only idiot having this issue. Is there anything else I can try to resolve this?

 

[imay1280]

So, I guess I am just going to use this forum as a sounding board for myself...

It seems that the order of explosions here is that there are multiple drivers that Windows likes better than the actual driver that makes my HDMI sound work properly, and when the computer gets turned off, or I change HDMI inputs on my receiver, the computer forgets that the device ever existed and opts to install one of the other (incorrect) drivers instead.

The Realtek R2.70 drivers install, but also opt to a device that is labeled as "ATI HDMI Audio", which doesn't work. What works properly is the driver for "Realtek HDMI Audio", that it no longer opts to. When I go through the driver ZIP file instead of the EXE, there are a metric ton of drivers that are called the same thing, and I have no idea how to figure out which one I need. Any thoughts? If not, I will come back and answer myself in a week or so...

 

[sebliminal]

You ever fix this? Struggling with similar problem...except I don't want HDMI. I just want to use my original soundcard for sound...