Black Screen with Asus Xonar DX

Question

I just installed Windows 10 on a Samsung 960 Evo (UEFI mode) and successfully installed all drivers except the one for my sound card. As soon as I install the driver for my Asus Xonar DX, I get a black screen which persists after booting and that I can only fix by booting in safe mode and then uninstalling the driver, but then I have no sound. This happens both with the official 8.1.8.1823 driver from ASUS and with the UNi Xonar Drivers 1.81 (1.80 as well). I already deactivated the onboard sound of my mainboard.

The strange thing is that it works without problems on my old Windows 10 installation (non-UEFI mode) with the old official driver (8.1.8.1822) on my Samsung 840 Evo. I tried installing 8.1.8.1822 on my new installation but it does not accept it because it is written for Windows 8.1 (I upgraded my old Windows installation from Windows 8 to 10, which seemingly kept the driver).

How can I install the sound card driver without getting a black screen?

My System

• CPU: Ryzen 7 1700, Arctic Liquid Freezer 120
• Mainboard: MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon
• RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX schwarz DDR4-3000 DIMM CL15 Dual Kit
• GPU: Radeon HD 7950
• PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2
• SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250 GB & Samsung 960 Evo M.2 NVMe 500 GB
• Monitor: LG 27UD58P-B & HP ZR24w
• OS: Windows 10 64 Bit

P.S.: According to https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f267/onboard-sound-alc1220-vs-asus-xonar-d2x-1177213.html, the Windows 8 drivers are installable by changing the last line of CmSetx.dll to SupportOS=donotcare. I will try that as well and report back.

P. P. S. : the Mainboard manual shows this as "PCIe bandwidth table", do I understand correctly that I can place the sound card wherever I want? Or do I have "2 way" active?

 Slot Single                  2-Way
 PCI_E1 2.0 x1               ―
 PCI_E2 3.0 x16*       3.0 x16*
 PCI_E3 2.0 x1               ―
 PCI_E4  ― 2.0 x1      2.0 x4*
 PCI_E5 2.0 x1               ―

P. P. P.S.: 2-way seems to refer to SLI mode with two GPUs, which I don't use, and I also found out that I can access the new SSD just fine from the old OS, so it seems to be a driver issue and not a hardware / slot / PCIe related one.

Answer 1

Moving the card from PCI_E3 to PCI_E2 and using the Windows 10 driver fixed the problem. While the Windows 8.1 beta driver 8.1.8.1822 could be installed with the DLL edit mentioned in the question once the card was moved, the driver was nonfunctional.

I still have no idea why this fixed the problem though and would be very glad if someone could provide an explanation for that. What baffles me most is that it worked on the old OS with the old slot while still allowing access to the new drive.

P.S.: Shortly after I wrote this answer, my OS froze again but it works after a restart, I will monitor the situation and report this occurs again. P.P.S: It seems to be stable now. P P.P.S: I still get the occasional freeze even with the sound card removed, it seems to be an issue with the SSD.