One thing that's connected with this forthcoming reinstall of the chipset drivers is the old chestnut of "whither the UAA driver?". It's been quite some time since I originally got my P55-US3L system going but, to this day, it's not been clear to me whether I should be using the Microsoft UAA audio driver, which is offered by Gigabyte in two formats - bundled with the Azalea codec driver, and standalone. Specifically, I don't use the onboard Azalea audio. Instead, I use a PCI soundcard of proven integrity. The trouble has been, though, that, with my P55-US3L, there's been a persistent problem with the audio, in that if I stop the audio within an application and then restart it, it immediately distorts and becomes completely unlistenable and unintelligible; if I then reboot and re-run it, it's fine.
It's been unfortunate for me that I started with a Seagate HDD that, unknown to me at the time, had a manufacturing fault with its built-in controller (it being the sole HDD I use on the machine). Although the audio problem showed up immediately, it wasn't until much later that I realised from other symptoms that there was a more general problem with the HDD. Seagate then provided a partial solution to the controller issue, which appeared to cure most of the HDD's problems - but not the audio one.
I've learnt to live with the audio problem to some degree. But, all along, I've wondered whether it's been caused by lack of that UAA driver. I didn't, at the start, install the UAA driver simply because I honestly reckoned it wasn't required. But, as I say, I do now wonder.
I use the Windows default soundcard drivers, provided with the soundcard, and they've always worked fine on previous machines of mine. I've never before needed to install the UAA driver when using a separate soundcard. It's just that, in retrospect, I can't see why Gigabyte should be offering the UAA driver separately unless it's perhaps also required when a PCI or PCIe soundcard is used, regardless of what other audio drivers may be being used.
