Glad it works.
A small point of consistency, which is not very important, but in openSUSE we tend NOT to create an alsa-base file, but rather in openSUSE-11.2 we do edits to a 50-sound.conf file. Hence my recommendation would have been to insert the line
options snd-hda-intel model=laptop
as the 1st line in an /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf file.
I confess I am surprised an “alsa-base” file was even recognized in that directory. Possibly some code retained for backward compatibility with Ubuntu (who do use an alsa-base).