Current setup: I'm using an Asus motherboard with onboard Realtek audio, and an Nvidia 8400 graphics card (WinXP Home SP3). I have the 8400's DVI output connected to my Asus PC monitor at 1920x1080 resolution. I have the 8400's HDMI output connected to my Samsung living room TV at 1920x1080 resolution. The video works perfect on both LCD's. Audio plays back on both my PC speakers (via the 3.5mm line out on the mobo's integrated audio) and through my LCD TV (via HDMI) at the same time, allowing my to turn off which ever I don't want to listen to. Perfect. Today I received a new ATI HD5450 video card that I plan to use in a new PC build. I installed it in my current PC to make sure it works. Video works perfect - 1920x1080 on both LCD's. The audio - ugh! I originally installed only the basic video card driver. This worked great for the video. My onboard Realtek audio still worked, but I didn't have any audio over HDMI. So I installed the ATI HDMI audio driver. This allowed the HDMI audio to work perfectly, but my Realtek onboard audio device was now disabled. I found that my default sound device had changed from the Realtek onboard to the ATI HDMI Driver. By manually switching the sound device I can choose between HDMI audio or Realtek/PC audio. I uninstalled all ATI drivers and installed the full software suite from the included CD. Same thing. I can either have HDMI audio (using the ATI HDMI sound device) to my TV or I can have PC audio (using the Realtek sound device) to my PC speakers. I would be okay with that except for the fact that I have to manually change my default audio device every time I want to switch between my PC and TV. Is there a fix for this, or is that how ATI's audio works? Why would anyone want to disable their primary sound card everytime they want to watch a video with HDMI audio? Ideally I want it to work like my NVidia setup. My Nvidia setup had a digital audio cable going from the mobo to the video card, which is probably why it worked the way it did. The ATI video card doesn't have any external digital audio inputs on it. I think it's working like it's designed to, but not how I want it to. Are all ATI cards like this? I picked the ATI 5450 because I was looking for a fanless half-height video card. Any suggestions? Thanks. Matt
I noticed this with my 460 too.. nvidia installed a hd driver for the audio and I ended up with the same issue I uninstalled just the hd audio driver.. reinstalled the other driver- made sure it was working and then installed the nvidia hd audio back in by itself I dunno why it worked like that, but have both now
Your post gave me some hope... Unfortunately I still can't get my PC speakers and HDMI to work at the same time. I tried uninstalling all of the ATI video & HDMI drivers and the Realtek drivers, then reinstalling the ATI drivers followed by the Realtek - and vice versa - same as before. I still have to manually choose the sound device to listen to what I want. Thanks again. Matt
