Lost My Audio Drivers! HELP!

[IcKy99]

Ok so I just bought a XFX Radeon HD 4650, and as soon as i installed the drivers my Realtek audio drivers were gone, now i cant hear anything, and ive already downloaded two different realtek packs, not sure wich one it is, so if anyone knows what i should do, any help would be much appreciated.

[Hobie-wan]

If neither download is working and you can't figure out the correct ones, why don't you just completely uninstall the existing broken drivers, restart, then let windows update sort it out?

[Anapan]

You can open the computer up, and locate the sound chip (has a crab picture) and get the chip's serial number RTL#### and locate the driver that way, or go into the device manager, look for the soundcard (if the driver's gone it'll have a yellow triangle with a exclamation mark in it) right-click on it, and choose properties, then switch the the details tab. Look for VEN_#### and DEV_####
VEN is the vendor number (Realtek) DEV is the unique number identifying the device. Googling those two 4 digit numbers will usually point you to a working driver, or at least the filename of one which can be googled for a download.
If you still can't find it, post those 2 numbers or the writing on the chip and I can probably dig something up.

I've seen those chips just suddenly stop working before, and found a cheap solution rather than getting a whole new motherboard or a real soundcard - USB soundcard. They're easy and foolproof, usually less than $10 too.

[Hobie-wan]

You could also fetch and run the standalone SIW, click motherboard, then look up your board on the manufacturer's site to get the right driver. I assumed that if the OP hadn't already pulled the side off the machine to look at the motherboard or sound chip, that they weren't enthusiastic about doing so. Sometimes something just happens and the driver for a device just needs to be pulled out and reinstalled from scratch. If the sound hadn't physically gone belly up, this would likely be the easiest way to get it going again.

[IcKy99]

haha ok so turns out, my new grafix card installs a HDMI audio driver, i simply force enabled onboard sound from my bios, now it works fine, thanks for the help tho!