[SOLVED] 3mm Jack won't sense Headphones after installing Nvidia 1060 3gb Graphics card

Aug 28, 2020
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How's it going? I plugged in my headphones this morning to find out that my computer doesn't sense them. No pop-up from Realtek audio manager as usual or connection sound. I checked device manager to see if the drivers needed an update and to my surprise... Realtek was completely gone! The only driver I see is for Nvidia. My headphones simply aren't being detected by my computer because of this. I'm kind of a total noob when it comes to this kind of stuff, so I've been trying to fix this all morning. Here are a few things I've tried:
  • Uninstalling Nvidia drivers and installing the latest RealTek ones (upon restarting the Realtek drivers are nowhere to be found and the Nvidia drivers are redownloaded)
  • Going into BIOS to enable Realtek audio
  • Updating absolutely everything audio/windows 10 related I could find
  • Crying alone is a corner
Any USB audio devices and built-in monitor speakers work fine.

The only thing that I can think of is that when I downloaded the drivers for my new Nvidia 1060 3GB last night it somehow disabled/uninstalled realtek audio? But then wouldn't redownloading the drivers fix it...?

Here are my specs:
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor, 3500 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Motherboard: Asus b350 PLUS
Power source: 500w
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 3gb
Operating System: Windows 10 64bit

I went directly to Nvidia about this but they just told me to uninstall/reinstall drivers which didn't work.

Thank you so much and I hope that we can find an answer so me (and any future people who might have this problem) can get their audio back.
 
"I went directly to Nvidia about this but they just told me to uninstall/reinstall drivers which didn't work"

What they told you to do was correct, but at the reinstall stage you need to choose "Custom install" which then allows you to deselect all the Nvidia audio drivers before proceeding.

I had the same issue when I installed my first graphics card which had an integrated audio device for audio through HDMI (which I didn't want). When the penny dropped I fixed it as above.
 
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"I went directly to Nvidia about this but they just told me to uninstall/reinstall drivers which didn't work"

What they told you to do was correct, but at the reinstall stage you need to choose "Custom install" which then allows you to deselect all the Nvidia audio drivers before proceeding.
I tried what you said and the Nvidia audio drives are gone but still no sign of Realtek. (besides a new "High definition Audio device" in my device manager. Other than that my audio still doesn't work and Realtek Audio manager is nowhere to be found. Realtek isn't showing up in my control panel either. 🙁 However, there is a folder labeled "realtek" in my programs folder which wasn't there before. So maybe we're getting somewhere?

There really should be a way to simply revert audio settings back to factory default hahaha.

Thanks for helping me out though and if you have any more ideas (without taking up too much of your time) I'd love to hear them.
 
Maybe you accidently unplugged the HD audio connector from your motherboard while you were replacing the GPU. The connector is usually located somewhere under the GPU, it's responsible for the audio jack from your chassis.