[Resolved]GL753VE sound hardware disabled after Mint Linux 18.1 install

[brew1brew]

I purchased a ROG GL753VE from Costco this week, I setup dual boot with Mint linux 18.1 and the install was quite easy, everything seemed to be running out of the box. The only change I made to bios was to disable secure boot.

After getting everything setup I noticed that the sound hardware quite responding, like there wasn't any installed. In Linux I go to sound config I see Dummy Output, In Windows 10 it doesn't find any hardware installed.

But Linux does see the hardware it just doesn't seem to respond

les@les-RoG ~ $ dmesg | grep snd
[    4.534900] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[    4.535157] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[    4.660265] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: CORB reset timeout#1, CORBRP = 0
[    4.661798] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: no codecs found!

les@les-RoG ~ $ lspci -v|grep -A7 -i "audio"
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device a171 (rev 31) (prog-if 80)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1590
	Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 32, IRQ 130
	Memory at df420000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) 
	Memory at df400000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) 
	Capabilities: 
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

I thought this was a hardware fault so I returned the laptop to Costco and got another one, the second one had a corrupt hard drive and wouldn't finish the windows setup. So I got a third one and it did the same as the first one, sound initially worked then quit working. I updated the BIOS to 302 and I installed the latest 4.8 kernel (4.8.0.53).

I think if I can fix this in linus maybe the hardware will be recognized by windows again. Unless there is a hardware bug in these that Linux drivers cause the sound hardware to crash???

any suggestions are welcome. Thanks for your help in advance.
Les

[brew1brew]

I figured it out! Long story short, the nVidia drivers were the culprit!

First the issue was that the sound chip was disabled, I found a reference to "(ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])" being a video card error. first I switched drivers to the x-org one and the sound chip was still disabled. So I went back to the nVidia drivers and launched the nVidia settings app and noticed that there was an option for using the intel GPU/driver to save power, so I selected that and restarted X. Walla! the intel driver reenabled the sound chip, in both Linux and Windows! switched back to the nVidia GPU/driver and it was a little flaky.

So I went to the nVidia site and found that there was a later driver than the one in the drivers app. So I added the graphics driver PPA and installed the latest driver and that fixed everything in both Linux and Windows.