Got this new motherboard and it’s running 11.4 of Opensuse and it works great. Even got the DVI working with the monitor with help of instructions I found here. However the sound is poor and the volume controls just as bad. According to the motherboard docs it has THX Tru Studio sound pro, a Intel H67 (B3) chipset. Six audio ports. And the chipset integration by Realtek ALC837. I have tried to find this information in the sound setup with no luck. What was selected was the Intel model (no other specifics was found). According to the Alsamixer it says HDA Intel PCH and the card and chip is set as PulseAudio.
What should the sound card be set to other than Intel?
So I don’t have any motherboards that I recall using the ALC837 and I could hardly find any matches when doing a search. If we can assume its not a typo, it must be so new, little information exists on it. I have recently used with success the ALC889 and ALC889A chipsets under openSUSE 11.3 & 11.4. I would say however, that my main PC uses a Creative Card, SB0886 Called a PCIe Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty and I have a SB073A called a PCI Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer. The latter includes an Optical Output, but it requires an odd looking cable on one end to reach through an audio plug to the Toslink optical connector. I use the first on my main PC with Digital Output, the second for my Daughter PC using Analog and my ALC889A chipset is on my Media Center PC. It is running openSUSE 11.3 and plays Dolby Digital 5.1 to my Sony Receiver. However, I have oddities with the ALC889A trying to play analog audio on the RealTek chipset. I don’t have such issues using the Creative Sound cards. I know that it may be hard to part with $100 or so US for a sound card when sound is built in on the motherboard and the MB only cost $40 more than the sound card. This is particularly true when you got the new built-in video to work, but alas, built in Audio can mostly suck except is a few rare cases and RealTek produces so many chipsets, you can’t tell what you got until you find out it does not work right. If it was me, I would look for a good add in sound card and abandon the built-in RealTek badness.
An ALC837 is new to me. I confess I’ve never encountered it. Did you look at the information requested to be provided by our multimedia stickie and confirm from the diagnostic script that one is asked to run there that it is indeed an ALC837 ? … stickie URL here: Welcome to multimedia sub-area
My apologies, it is an ALC887. I did see the link about the page about providing information about the sound cards when one has a problem. Thought I would do some research here in the forum first in case it was a simple thing to fix. Think the next thing to do is to send the information.