One workaround that has worked for most people is to select AC97 instead of HD Audio, but since I spent $230 in this motherboard I'm not going to tolerate any faulty component even if it's one I use every once in a while. I could call Newegg and request a replacement, but after all the hours I spent putting the rig together, plus all the hours spent installing Windows, drivers, updates and programs, when I have only three hours a day of free time during the week, is not too appealing to me to say the least.

This time I chose the driver version that was before last, but it hasn't changed anything. The first Win 7 installation I did I installed the latest drivers from Asus, but then I found out that Home Premium doesn't access more than 16 GB of RAM, so I had to go buy 7 Pro, reformat and install again from scratch. Nothing else seems to be failing, so I wonder if it's the audio chip on the motherboard or just buggy drivers. So I thought I had a bad motherboard, but there seems to be tons of people with this problem across several motherboards, unless all those people also have a faulty motherboard. I did unplug the connector to the motherboard, checked that all the pins were straight and plugged it back in. But if it worked fine for two years and I didn't pull on the cables, I don't see why all of a sudden it would start causing shorts or anything. It's inside an enclosure that doesn't have accessible screws as far as I can see. I opened the case and tried to get to the front audio panel but it seems impossible, even after I took out the optical drive below it.

The new one looks like this (don't pay attention to the Asus thing in the back, they look like they're the same but the Asus suite just happened to be in the background when I took the screenshot): The audio chipset was also Realtek, and the audio control panel was essentially the same but an older version that had a different skin.

The PC case is the same I used for two years in my last build, a Cooler Master ATCS 840, and I was using a Gigabyte motherboard for an AMD 1090T CPU, and never had this problem. I click OK to that, and a few seconds later I get the balloon again saying that a device has been unplugged. I just finished my build with this motherboard and I'm having a problem that is getting on my nerves, which apparently many other people do with Realtek chips.Īt random intervals that can be sometimes 20 minutes apart but sometimes 1 minute, a balloon in the tray pops up up saying that I just plugged a device, and the audio control panel pops up asking which type it is, with headphones selected by default, even though no headphones have been plugged in.

Get around asus realtek audio