Which realtek driver to use?

I just got a new Gigabyte motherboard with an onboard azalia codec by realtek. Right now it's working pretty well with the drivers windows 7 auto-installed, but I also can use drivers provided from Gigabyte or directly from Realtek. I find the Realtek tray software to be kind of annoying, but it seems like a requirement for some of the features I need, like microphone boosting. I'm guessing there are a few experienced onboard audio users around here, what do you use?

Can you install the Realtek drivers, but disable the tray thing using msconfig?

when i updated my drivers via the realteck site (mobo in sig) all of the sound effects went missing. so i would advise not d/l the newest drivers from there.

just use the ones from the diver cd and disable the notification via the notification center in the taskbar properties and set it to never show. that way it will give you all the things you need without the notification bar icon being visible.

nooster said:

when i updated my drivers via the realteck site (mobo in sig) all of the sound effects went missing. so i would advise not d/l the newest drivers from there.

just use the ones from the diver cd and disable the notification via the notification center in the taskbar properties and set it to never show. that way it will give you all the things you need without the notification bar icon being visible.

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what? your windows sound effects went missing? that's weird.

hey, I decided to go with Realtek's version. basically it's a newer version of the driver and management software that Gigabyte had up, it's just that Gigabyte named it based on the driver version and Realtek packs the driver and software into release packages or something. Between the two of them it was kind of difficult to nail down what version anything was. The software is kinda necessary if you want stuff like the front panel to work correctly, but you can disable the tray icon if you want, it's a setting in the software.

Realtek drivers are best to use when you have multiple sound outputs since it allows individual output assignment. I believe the gigabyte ones are the same driver maybe just an older version.

Yeh all the sound enhancements weren't available /(like loundenss equalizer and bass booster) I thought might have just been a dodgy install but was def the realtek driver.

Ended up reinstalling the driver from the MB cd to get them back was very weird