I'm experiencing a strange problem with my Windows HD Audio setup that's really affecting my gaming experience. My system keeps detecting a non-existent headset, which shows up in the device list briefly and then disappears, only to reappear again in quick succession. This flickering causes annoying sound stutters and game lag, which makes it hard to play. Just yesterday everything was working fine!
Here's my setup: an R5 5600 processor, 32GB of 3200MHz RAM, an RX 9060 XT graphics card, and a B450 Tomahawk Max II motherboard, so I don't think it's a hardware issue.
So far, I've tried disabling/removing devices through Device Manager and restarting the Windows Audio services, but nothing seems to resolve it. I'm at my wits' end after spending all day troubleshooting this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I wish I could share videos to illustrate the issue better, but that's not possible here.
2 Answers
Do your AMD graphics cards have an audio driver that could be causing the issue? I had a similar problem in the past with NVIDIA drivers acting up. You might want to look into that and see if it’s affecting your setup.
It sounds like you might be having driver issues. If you built your PC, have you installed the chipset drivers for your motherboard? Many people miss this step. Check if Windows is using a generic driver instead of the one from your motherboard's support page. Go ahead and download the correct driver, disconnect from the Internet so Windows doesn’t reinstall anything automatically, uninstall the current HD audio driver, then reboot and install the downloaded driver. That should help!
I tried installing the Realtek driver, but it didn't work properly; my headphones were buzzing the whole time.
Yeah, they do, but I disabled them already. The one that keeps popping up in my device list has the same name as mine (High Definition Audio) but with a headphone icon instead of a speaker.