onboard sound not working

I'm running XP on an Abit AV8 board with an onboard Realtek97 codec from VIA. The chipset is VIA K8T800 Pro + VT8237. No sound is coming out. Otherwise the board is working fine.

I've tried every set of drivers I could find, including ones from VIA and ones from Abit. The device is enabled in the BIOS and in Windows, there are no hardware conflicts, and the Device Manager claims the device is working properly. As far as Windows can tell, everything is fine.

Any suggestions besides getting a PCI sound card? I thought a hardware problem would manifest itself in either crappy sound or some kind of issue the operating system would notice - this is just weird.

 

Silly question, but you have the speakers plugged in to the right port, and the sound isn't muted/lowered?

I've even made the mistake of plugging into the subwoofer or digital out port myself.

 

Yeah, I've tried multiple sets of speakers and headphones (all function with other devices) - nothing. I even set the sound field to 5.1 surround and plugged my speakers into the rear speaker port, just in case the front speaker port alone is dead. Still nothing.

That reminds me though - the Realtek driver set comes with a utility that detects devices plugged into the audio ports. This utility fails to detect either speakers or headphones plugged into the front speaker port (or any port). In fact, a warning pops up telling me to check that I didn't plug the device into the "in" or "mic" port by accident.

 

Has restarting with the swapped hardware plugged in had any effect?

Have you gone straight to Realtek?

http://www.realtek.com/