Enable AC97 on Asus A7V880 with second sound card

When adding a PCI sound card on the Asus A7V880 motherboard, it automatically disables the onboard sound. This is really annoying if you, like me, want to use a dual sound card setup - one sound card for the OS sounds and one sound card for recording music.

There's no way in the BIOS to re-enable the AC97 sound, but after a bit of Googling I found some forum posts and finally managed to enable it and make it happen automatically on login.

The trick is to toggle a bit in a PCI control register, and then scan for hardware changes.

To toggle the bit, I use WPRCSET, which can be found here. After installing, start WPCRSET.EXE.



Click Add and add these settings: Bus 0, Device 17, Function 0, Register 50, Data 80. Then click OK and select the 'Start' radiobutton. Click OK to close WPCRSET. You have now enabled WPCRSET which will enable your AC97-card after a reboot.

To scan for hardware changes automatically (instead of using Device Manager manually each time you reboot), do the following:

Download DevCon from Microsoft here (The link is under 'MORE INFORMATION'). After extracting it in e.g. "C:\Utility\DevCon\", add a shortcut in the 'Startup' folder in your start menu. The shortcut should have these parameters:



After rebooting, and logging in, your AC97 soundcard should be enabled, as well as your additional sound card!