

I installed the new Gameready drivers and the realtek drivers, the audio sign came back but it is projecting audio out of the HDMI, and the speaker or headphone is not showing up in "Playback Devices". Please note I am using a VGA-to-HDMI active converter as my LCD only has VGA. Then I took out the old card and reinstalled the new 1050ti and the audio was gone again. The sound started working, the headphones and front speaker both worked, I checked. I installed legacy drivers as some website suggested, and installed the older graphics drivers for my old card. I installed windows 8.1 again, nothing happened to audio.

Moreover, I took out the 1050ti and reinstalled my previous graphics card (8600 gt).It didn't work. then reconnect headphone in place do they show now ? anything show ? if not goto device manager, and right click on sound card and uninstall,(disconnect headphones from sound card then reboot computer) check sound card status again. (maybe some unknown hardware component.Right click and select show disabled. So basically it's a combination of the following: Recent Nvidia Drivers + Windows 10 Fall Creators Update + Fast Start enabled in power options. Also did a shutdown/turn off PSU and drain power/ cold boot and no audio crackle. When I saw the text on the fast start option "Restart isn't affected" I instantly thought this might fix it finally?! So I disabled fast startup, did a shutdown and startup and no audio crackle. Just a little bit ago I saw this thread on PCMR: I've known for like a week that rebooting the system(after every boot) was a workaround that would make the crackle disappear, but first boots always had it. There may be a hardware component to this, I have a Asus Z370-F with the latest bios and a 1080ti but I've seen people with older stuff say they had the problem as well. The original issue: When the GPU was under load such as from a game, benchmark, or GPU miner, if there was any audio playing(using a source other than the HDMI/displayport audio) there would be a crackling sound in the audio. TLDR: Disable Fast start(hibernation) in Windows Power options.
