Sound card freezing on fresh install of Windows 10

Question

Today I've decided to finally buy a genuine version of Windows 10, good thing. I wanted to start over a fresh and clean install of Windows 10, so I formatted everything.

But right now, every 2 minutes aprox. my sound is stopping for 2 seconds, and resuming at same point.

Hardware : MB : Asus z87 gaming Sound card : Asus Xonar AE

Already checked :

• The Xonar drivers are correctly installed and up-to-date.
• I have no other audio driver installed.
• Integrated audio is disabled in BIOS.
• I have tried generic Windows drivers.
• Intel Management Engine Interface drivers are installed and up-to-date.
• All Windows update are installed.

If you have an idea, it would be perfect !

PS : everything worked like a charm before format.

Thanks by advance !

Answer 1

To summarize the above comments and show how to proceed in analyzing such problems:

Before formatting the disk one should always take some precautions, like taking an image of the system disk and at least a backup of all the drivers. Unfortunately, this was not done here.

There are only two possibilities in this case to find good drivers :

1. Let Windows assign its own drivers
2. Download drivers from the manufacturer's support website.

Both of these were done, but did not solve the problem.

Sometimes older drivers for the device work better then the latest version, when the problem was only recently introduced, so are worth searching. But there were none to be found for the Asus Xonar AE.

The only tool to resolve audio problems within Windows itself is running the Troubleshooting tool for "Playing audio". That did not help either.

I pointed to two posts that contain many workarounds for audio problem that could help:

• Windows 10 Audio Stuttering for general Windows 10 advice
• How to fix sound pop/click/stutter due to DPC latency for Asus audio problems

Unfortunately, the poster tried all the suggestions, but none of them helped.

Basically, we have exhausted here all the easy solutions.
There are now only these possible avenues for a solution:

1. Reset or Refresh Windows back to the original manufacturer's version to return the original drivers. If Windows 10 was an upgrade, this may restore the previous Windows version. This option is not always available, depending on the chosen upgrade path and whether the entire disk was formatted or only the Windows partition.
2. Survey the Asus support website for future driver versions
3. Contact Asus Support for advice on fixing the problem
4. Ask Asus Support for an installation disk for Windows 10 for this computer model (may require a small payment).
5. Use another sound card for which Windows has a good driver.

I wish to stress to every reader that doing a clean install of Windows is a very dangerous operation. Proper backup is absolutely necessary and a restore option should always be set up, because the new installation may have problems whose solutions only exist in the installation that was wiped out. Such problems may be very hard to solve even for experienced users.