Actually, now things seem to work.

What happened was that I made my first post, then I quit suse and went to vista to do stuff. After I saw the replies I booted back into suse. Before it even got to the login screen, I was greeted with a continuous LOUD ear-piercing BEEP, but curiously, the startup sound played as the desktop loaded up, even though it was distorted. I just had to disable "internal mic" in order to get rid of the beep, and now sound seems to work fine around 70% volume.

I'm a total newb at Linux. I messed around with Ubuntu on Wubi then decided to try out OpenSuSe after hearing some good things about it.

Sorry about the false alarm, haha..

There's still something I'm wondering though.. Why is it that full volume result in distorted sound?