Sound Card Purchase Dilemma

When I got the sound card to install "correctly", I completely cleaning up all traces of all audio remnants in my system drive, including the registry, and also turned off the system audio in my BIOS. Now, before going through all the above again, to reinstalling the sound card driver, like I did before, I decided to try some few other options.

1. I removed the current system drive and plugged in the cloned drive.
2. I rolled back my system to the earliest state I have, sixteen days ago.
3. I restored my system image to January 29. I did not want to restore an earlier date image.

In all the above three scenarios, I see the same things as in the attached images.
This tells me that the sound card is broken. I never moved the computer and no earthquake to unseat the sound card from the board.

The cloned drive, system state and the backup image, all three were the exact copy of my system, after the sound card was finally working and Windows 10 OS updated. If none of these three work, there would be no need to trying to reinstalling the drivers; just a thought.

The "Dell SE2417HG" should be the monitor audio.

How odd. Although I very rarely use W10 I fired it up to check. I applied every update there was to get those out of the equation and checked. Everything is behaving (screenshot). Maybe it is a hardware fault but is it the card or motherboard? I'd just reseat it out of curiosity. Shame, I thought we'd cracked it.

TBH I cannot "parse" what that means, if the card is broken (in such case I would also suspect about the slot or motherboard drivers, not complete list) or if it's just w/o drivers. The Windows Sound interface is quite ineffective since Vista, imo.

In this system (that is Windows 7 but should be similar in this) in Device Manager it shows two "Sound, video and game controllers": Creative SB X-Fi and AMD High Definition Audio Device (the latter is associated to the AMD HD5450 gfx card's HDMI output). For sure they wouldn't appear in such a clean way if their drivers weren't installed properly. If you cannot see any "Unknown device" or similar there, try View -> Devices by connection. In that view I have this Creative SB X-Fi under ACPI x64-based PC -> Microsoft-ACPI Compliant System -> PCI bus -> PCI standard PCI-toPCI bridge (there're several like this, browse every one) -> Creative SB X-Fi (there will be something similar to "PCI bus", likely with other name, "holding" almost all your devices). This view could be more reliable at showing what does "exist", although your device could be showed with other name (like "Unknown device") and with a yellow circle indicating problems.

You can also launch the install software. If it doesn't find the target device, it will tell you and won't run.

I removed the card and reinserted firmly, still the card would not be recognized.

Since the card could not be recognized by:
1. Switching to cloned disk.
2. Reverted to previous system state.
3. Restore to previous image.
I decided to switch ports on the mortherboard; I switched from #3 to #4, and bam, the card got recognized. Drivers installed and sound booming out of the speakers.

For now, I'm fine. Thank you so much for all your suggestions in helping me, well appreciated.

Interesting, I'd have plumped for slot 4 (given the choice) from the off. I bet it behaves now.

Cyber Acoustic Speakers CA-3810
Windows10

One thing I noticed is the connection from the satellite speakers to the woofer is bent. Currently, I don't have sound at all from my right speaker. I am going to use the multimeter to check the right speaker. But in the mean time, I need to eliminate a possible issue with the woofer connection.

According to the attached images,
A, B, C, D, all go the jack that goes to the woofer. It has four wires.
I thought I could use the spare stereo cable I have in my wire box, F, G & H.
If the satellite wire has four wires, guess I would have to get me a jack with four connections.

Cheers

UPDATE

I got a 3.5mm cable extension I used to connect the satellite speakers to the broken sub woofer plug.
I got an angles one to flush more the sub-woofer.
Now, all is well.

Thanks you all for all your suggestions.
Cheers