I had stopped using a sound card on my last build. That's an XP machine.
That mobo was a Stryker Extreme by ASUS. Had it RMA'ed 4 times. This was when the bad capacitors were rampant. Anyways the Creative sound card used irq 16??????????????? I dumped the card and used mobo sound. It solved the issue then. Since then I replaced the ASUS mobo with a comparable Gigabyte mobo. Its my backup/bench machine. Use it to service my SSD's and other little crap.
To be honest I never really tried a sound card on this build, went straight to mobo sound. When I 1st flew AH, year and a half no issues. Now 3 years later, took a year off, the latest drivers a problem. Then no windows 7 SP1, older RealTek HD audio drivers. Now using SP1 and latest RealTek HD drivers??????????????
I tried drivers from Realtek site and from Gigabyte site, no difference.
There can be conflicts if you install the Nvidia HD sound drivers with the video card package, and not use them but I did not install them.
I just flew for over an hour using MS drivers, perfectly fine????????????????????? All sounds were crystal clear. Just gonna stick with MS drivers.
S