Asus p4s8x-x soundmax card not working

Hi,

I have the aforementioned M/B with built in soundmax card. I have un-installed and re-installed the card and windows xp (home) reports that all is fine yet there is no sound at all. The BIOS is Asus P4s8x-x ACPI Bios Revision 1004. I don't even see an option in the BIOS to disable the onboard audio so I can install a 3rd party! This is the latest version of the BIOS so I am thinking about going backwards to see if I get the option to configure the onboard audio.

Any suggestions?

 

Did this just happen? Is this a new build, or just modified? If none of the above, what changes did you make just before the sound quit on you?

As for regressing your BIOS firmware, try to find out whether the option to turn off the built-in audio gear exists in an earlier version. I'm not sure that it does.

 

The problem existed before I got a look at the PC. I tried using the dos based aflash with v1002 BIOS and it said it was successful but when I rebooted, no post at all. I cleared CMOS by removing battery, power and jumpering the clear CMOS switch for 30 seconds - still no post. This is bad. Without a post, there is not much I can do

 

I don't think clearing the CMOS chip will have any impact on the firmware. As far as I know, clearing the CMOS just clears all the BIOS settings and returns them to their defaults. But you might want to make real sure that the jumper on the CLRTC header got put back on pins 1-2 and isn't upside down or something so that it isn't connecting those pins.

It looks like maybe you got a bad BIOS update file, or the wrong one, or the BIOS flash process fell off the rails somewhere. Hopefully, your board incorporates the ASUS CrashFree BIOS feature -- and you prepared the necessary floppy disk before you flashed your BIOS with the older firmware version. That's an issue I have no direct experience with -- hopefully, somebody else out there has some bright ideas.

As for the SoundMax situation: do you know enough of the system's history to answer the questions in my previous post? If the board was recently (re-)installed in a case that has no front-panel audio connections, the FP_AUDIO header on the motherboard may need to be jumpered to route the audio output to the rear panel jacks. The mobo manual for my ASUS board was not clear on that point; I see the manual for your board says nothing at all. If this is a possibility, you could try jumpering the BLINE_OUT and Line out pins for both stereo channels.