Running dual sound cards?

I’m running an integrated Realtek chip alongside a Creative PCI card, but I've hit a snag. Every time I plug the PCI card in, the Realtek audio disappears entirely. If I pull the PCI card out, the Realtek comes back. On my previous motherboard, I had no issues running both sound devices simultaneously, and I could easily toggle which one was the default in the sound settings. Now, I'm only seeing a single option. Does anyone know how to get both showing up at once? My current board is an ASRock P67 Extreme 4.

granitepanther8 said:I’ve got an integrated Realtek chip and a Creative PCI card. Every time I plug in the PCI card, the Realtek disappears. If I pull the card out, the Realtek shows up again. On my old motherboard, I had zero issues running both audio devices at once, and I could just pick my default in the sound properties. Now, I only see one option. When the card is out, it's Realtek. When the card is in, Realtek is gone. Does anyone know how to get them both active at the same time? My board is an ASUS ROG Maximus.

It looks like they probably didn't account for this specific setup during testing. You might be able to head into the Control Panel, open Device Manager, and try to manually enable the second device. I'm just not sure if the memory range is hardcoded for just one, or if you'll run into IRQ conflicts if you force it.

Anyway, if the manual fix doesn't work, shoot an email over to ASUS. They might release a BIOS update to address it. Back in the day, I actually used to write for MSI, and they ended up making two custom BIOS versions just for me.

IRQ sharing has been around forever. Honestly, you're probably not even going to run into a conflict these days... we don't really deal with those ancient first-gen PCI cards anymore, let alone ISA cards.

I'd guess this board has some kind of built-in detection for whether the sound device is integrated or external. There's likely some little utility to configure it. If it isn't in the BIOS, maybe it’s some app that comes bundled with the chipset drivers or whatever...