Vista - Adding Creative Audigy disables most of Realtek HD

Greetings,
I scanned through the forum and most of the internet and haven't found anyone with an answer to this situation

I have an HP pavilion m9357c which came with Vista x64 and 6 gigs ram plus an on-board Realtek ALC888 HD audio chip. Also an HDMI port on the video card, that has a connection to an SPDIF header on the motherboard for passing audio.

I need to add a Creative Audigy2 Platinum EX card for the added SPDIF input and analog outputs.

HOwever, once I do this, all the front and real panel Realtek ports go dead, the HD Audio Manager is gone, and won't display even when run manually, and the only audio playback options I have are the Creative analog out, and SPDIF out, plus the realtek HDMI audio on the video card, and that's it. No Realtek real panel, etc.

I checked the BIOS, and the audio is set to ON (was auto, so I made it on), yet still the chip seems to be neutered to just HDMI output.

Anyone else experience this and find a way around? Is it a Vista thing (doubt it, I had a similar setup with my other machine which was built up with Vista 32bit and an Asus motherboard), or is this a Realtek issue?

I do have latest drivers (2.10)

thx- sigmeda

Hi sigmeda and welcome to Vista Forums

This is perfectly normal. Just as installing a graphics card will disable any on-board graphics capability, so installing a sound card will do the same for on-board audio. This is to prevent conflicts, particularly if the on-board solution and the added card use different chip manufacturers (and hence different drivers).

Thanks for the reply.
I guess I would agree with you that onboard sound is often disabled when adding another sound card, however in this case it is not disabled, it is still active for HDMI audio (I show 3 playback devices, 2 from the Audigy, and HDMI audio from Realtek).

So how can I get back the rest of audio functionality? I've run systems with multiple sound cards before and as long as the on-board sound is not disabled in the BIOS (which it is not in my case) then they appear as normal.

Surely someone else has run into this, I would think.

Seems to me that the onboard sound is partially disabled for the reasons already mentioned. That is exactly how it's supposed to work. Nothing you can do about it.