Sound Card Driver Issue (not initializing on startup?)

Desktop Specs on profile. Anyways, lately my computer has had this issue where after a certain amount of time spent powered off, and i go to boot it up, the sound card drivers don't initialize on startup (Sys Tray Sound icon with Red X), and i have to restart a few times until the damn thing actually loads up the drivers right. Sometimes even after a few restarts it doesn't load it up at all, and it forces me to uninstall the sound card drivers, boot into safe mode (minimal), use the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) Utility to uninstall any remaining sound driver leftovers (yes i know the audio options remain as WIPs, but if its there and works, ill use them), and forces me to reinstall the drivers from scratch. Since my desktop is a dell pre-fab, the sound drivers it came with by default both involved realtek audio drivers as the windows defaults, so occasionally those drivers interfere with the SB Recon3D PCIe drivers that i downloaded from the creative website directly

I have already ran the holy trinity of cmd error checking utils (sfc, dism, chkdsk), and at one point did a full refresh/repair install of a windows 10 iso thinking it would do something about it.....but it hasnt. At this point, i wondered if it was the sound card in question, so during one of my "Dust out the Desktop" cleaning sessions a couple weeks ago, i took it out of the computer and gave it a thorough once over, trying to spot any sort of dink or something top to bottom, and i didnt see anything wrong. Could the issue lie with the sound card potentially entering its death throes, something with the motherboard, an issue software wise, something windows messed up with a windows 10 update?

You are talking about a sound card launched in 2012 which barely got a Windows 10 driver dated 2015.

If you have problems, don't blame it on all the other things that are newer and have current drivers.

the sound blaster service for the sound card is not set to automatic (delayed startup), but normal Automatic

huh....the stats on it look seemingly better than what my current sound card has, that's nice. i do have one side question tho, and that's about the cable that attaches to those prongs here

for the record, is said cable that latches onto here the power cable? i've noticed these prongs on my motherboard and always wondered what those were for

Don't bother buying discrete sound card.

Look at the Xonar SE driver --- it hasn't been updated since 2018 (the version is still 10.0.01.10). The driver release date may change but the version number has been the same since 2018 when it first came out.

It's been the SAME driver (10.0.01.10) since the sound card first came out in 2018.



Discrete sound card is a dead business. Gamers want to be streamers and youtubers --- so they buy "audio interface" and "audio mixers".

I've been looking at some of the external soundcards/DACs as a replacement/improvement for my Realtek onboard. Haven't found one worth pulling the trigger on in a reasonable price range for me (less than $100).