Posted on Apr 10, 2021 by kingbeowulf
Recently I ran into an issue where a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy RX 7.1 PCI-e card would not work on an ASUS Prime X570-P motherboard. This is an AMD Ryzen CPU motherboard with the X570 chipset with MS Windows 10 (gasp). We tried every slot to no avail. Searching the UEFI BIOS proved fruitless. Bad audio card? A quick online search should a number of issue getting the Audigy R and Z series cards operational in both Win10 and Linux on newer AMD motherboards. Rather than disable secure boot etc so that I could boot my trusty Slackware Live USB stick, I moved the card to the the Gigabyte X570 Aorus running Slackware64. The card worked! So what was the difference?
(n.b.: Win10 and it's secure boot was installed on this PC over my objections)
My Gigabyte X570 is using a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Z that worked out-of-the-box. A bit more searching suggested that there my be a motherboard firmware issue. I had recently upgraded the Gigabyte board's firmware recently for various Rysen CPU and DDR4 memory updates. A quick download from the Asus support site and the BIOS was updated from 2019 vintage to 2021. After the update, Win10 detected the Audigy RX, and we could install the drivers.
Note 1:
Gigabyte provides a dedicated USB port that makes firmware updates easy. Just download onto a USB stick and reboot into the UEFI Setup. Asus, however, provides a Windows executable archive and a file renaming utility before the UEFI setup can read the firmware from a USB stick. Idiocy.
Note 2:
I though this was a quirk of the Gigabyte motherboards, but the Asus did this as well. When you upgrade the new X570 firmware (a) won't or load saved settings form an older version, and (b) erases the EFI boot table with the result that the motherboard reports no boot devices found. Make sure you have USB or DVD boot media available to repair! I'm not sure about the secure boot keys (I don't use them). I recommend leaving secure boot off to be able to boot diagnostic OS other than Win10.
Posted on Nov 30, 2020 by kingbeowulf
Here's the long awaited update to my Slackware rebuild started in October (see 'To Everything There Is a Season' post Oct. 10, 2020). The new Ryzen system is up and running Slackware64-current multilib. I am a couple of weeks behind on updates. The new KDE/Plasma5 and Xfce 4.14 just hit /testing and should soon be merged in the main tree. The 15.0 release is looking good so far and will really shine on this new system.
Apr 10, 2021
kingbeowulf
Nov 30, 2020
kingbeowulf