Question ASUS H110-I M32CD4/DP_MB sound issues

[punkncat]

In amongst a pile of stuff I got was the above referenced motherboard. It, alongside two other boards failed my initial function testing. I took some time to go through them with both 6th and 7th gen CPU and where two of them will not boot up this one ended up working with a Celeron G3900 CPU I have on hand. I used that to flash the BIOS up to version 1102. I installed W10H and it activated so it was using that OS whenever its last use case was.

Support page:

M32CD - Support

www.asus.com

I actually had a bit of a time finding the proper support page as it appears this motherboard came from an ASUS VivoPC "M32CD". Searching that motherboard model on ASUS support site only returns an H110i-plus model of which the BIOS revisions, USB drivers, and sound drivers do not work. I luckily ran across a Reddit page where someone was referencing this motherboard and then to land on the Vivo support page above.

Everything is loaded in, got USB functionality to work, got the chipset driver(s) to opt from. This mobo has both an analog and a digital output covered by Realtek drivers. It will "see" when I connect or disconnect the analog speaker for the rear panel. If I look further in such as the sound mixer it will show that it thinks it has audio output by the green meter (as it were). There is no sound output via the analog onboard.

I don't currently have a case to utilize for testing, so no available front panel connector, and cannot bring an HDMI TV to the motherboard, so I cannot test to see if it will output sound that way. I have variously tried other drivers, delete the driver(s) and let Windows use its automatic loads, used the troubleshooter and so on.

As mentioned above, in spite of the BIOS update I cannot get any other CPU to work in this PC. I have tried a Pentium G4620 and an i3 7100 as well as two other Celeron of the same model. (Those CPU all work in another mobo I have aside from the Pentium G) Since this came in a prebuilt PC, the only thing I can find indicates this likely came with a 6th gen i5. The site has no CPU compatibility listings, but there are drivers and BIOS updates marked specific to Kaby or Skylake. I have tried each one of the available drivers for sound, rolled back the chipset drivers, pretty much everything I can think of.

I guess, long story short, is it possible for the onboard "amp" to go out but the device continues to think it is working properly?
Is it possible there was any manner of proprietary silliness going on with the original ASUS case?

 

[Lutfij]

I have variously tried other drivers, delete the driver(s) and let Windows use its automatic loads, used the troubleshooter and so on.
In this instance, you should manually install drivers that are meant for your sound card. The one the OS tends to use is hit or miss or worse, horrible. In fact, you should be able to see the audio codec/chip on the board located just behind the analog ports or towards the bottom left hand corner of the attached image below. ALC897's are usually the one's bundled with bottom of the barrel style motherboards.

I guess, long story short, is it possible for the onboard "amp" to go out but the device continues to think it is working properly?
I've had a motherboard get partially fried due to a bad PSU, back in 2003. The onboard sound card would show up on Device Manager, and show that it's working but no sound output, nor metering on the audio.

I tend to steer clear of these boards since they end up being a time drain.

 

[punkncat]

Thanks for the reply. Looks like ALC887 on this one. Little crab on the chip. I am going to do a bit more hunting on that aspect but consider the advice about not bothering is probably the best course of action. I note that someone even took the time to strip this motherboard of the M.2 wireless module so I may likely have not meant to be brought back to life in the first place.

 

[punkncat]

Welp....I ended up utilizing a few borrowed parts to take this system out to the living room TV for an HDMI test off a dGPU and it works swimmingly. Actually, even cooperates with 4K output on the half height 750ti I swapped in. Not that I would run it at that setting, would be much better suited for a 1080P HTPC solution so that is what I am going to try with it. Got a Silverstone Milo 11 case on the way to build it up in. Let's see if I can break a profit, lol.