I've been plagued by the two issues described in the Title ever since I build my system.
9800X3D
2x 32GB 6000-CL32 Ram
4TB Samsung Pro M2
Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360
Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 250 Ohms
Now here a more accurate description of the two problems.
1. The Audio
I've tried basically everything at this point, except buying a separate sound card or an external DAC. I re-installed Windows, I used custom audio drivers from the realtec homepage, I used the Windows default drivers, I re-installed Windows without any chipset drivers or specific asus drivers - nothing helped. The Audio is constantly crackling, bascially whenever at the start and end of every soundoutput, which is extremely annoying.
After a lot of investigation, I finally found out that this is due to the ALC4080 chip which is used on these "premium" mainboards. This audio chip seems to completely mess up the USB bus, while at the same time, it depends on it. The solution to the crackling is to find a way to permanently activate the audio stream, so that it cannot switch off and on - which causes the crackling. This can be done by activating the Microphone input, setting it to always on and then muting it via the volume control.
Problem solved, right? No. While this works for music, it causes massive "popping" when listening to somebody speaking, which is about evenly as annoying. I have not found any fix for this popping. This is why think the ALC4080 is total garbage. If anybody here has a solution for that, outside of generic "have you tried to install X" replies, I would be very grateful.
2. Random Freezes while booting into Windows
Now you might ask yourself, why doesnt this guy check the event viewer? This guy did, its empty. The problem itself is super weird, because this happens exclusively after the Windows Loginscreen. The desktop loads, some Apps load, and then the system becomes more and more unresponsive. I can open the Task Manager, but it will only load it's Border and Background and not show any tasks. It can not be closed or interacted with anymore. New programs wont start. The more I click around, the less responsive the system becomes. I can not restart it via the start menu, because the start menu will freeze in place and also become unresponsive after opening it once.
So, either it works, or the system freezes after 15-20 seconds and I need to hard reset it. The freeze happens about 1/6 boots (i keep track of it ...) and there is no clear pattern to it. I have tried to uncheck every single auto-start program and tool, which did nothing. I disabled quick boot in Windows and in the BIOS and did bascially everything every generic GPT-like AI would suggest. This leads me to belive that this issue is driver-related, but since the system is freezing and not bluescreening, I dont see what is wrong. I even went so far as to putting control software in autostart to check if there is anything weird going on with, e.g. the USB bus, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Note: If this problem does not happen (which is 5/6 times), then the system works perfectly fine - im Gaming, working with massive Tools like Visual Studio and Unreal Engine, I run at least 5 VMs simultaneously and do all kinds of stuff. It works WHENEVER it gets past those dreaded 20 seconds post-Windowslogin.
The audio issue i can live with, because apparently everybody else has it too - there are hundreds of posts on reddit alone about the faulty ALC4080 piece of garbage chip and it messing up the USB bus. This seemingly can be bypassed by throwing another 100 bucks at it and buying an external DAC. But the Freezeing after logging into Windows becomes really really annoying, sometimes it hits 2 times in a row. I dont think anybody will be able to help with that one, unless its somwhow a known problem and evaded my searches? Who knows, maybe it is even related to the audio issue.
At this point I would be happy about every new information.
