Im not 100% sure yet but i seem to have fixed my issues with sound. I will post later if they appear again but so far so good.

Things i did:

1) Unistalled Asus AI Suite 3 and used: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?34503-AI-Suite-III-Cleaner

Cleaner removes 3 additional services which are left after Asus AI Suite 3. Apparently it installed 2 USB drivers which might have been interfering with my usb devices and created latency issues. I've used LatMon and Process Monitor to find out which drivers were causing latency issues.

2) Uninstalled Realtek sound device from the control panel -> programs and made sure it deleted Sonic Suite 2 as well. Then rebooted the pc so Windows installed its generic driver. Realtek driver was causing sound issues by itself.

Also i switched off ASmedia usb controller, intel controller and speedstep in bios settings and set energy saving plan to "perfomance" in control panel. This last step i think is not necessary and ill be switching everything back on but just in case you can try it as well.

Celador wrote:
Im not 100% sure yet but i seem to have fixed my issues with sound. I will post later if they appear again but so far so good.

Things i did:

1) Unistalled Asus AI Suite 3 and used: http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?34503-AI-Suite-III-Cleaner

Cleaner removes 3 additional services which are left after Asus AI Suite 3. Apparently it installed 2 USB drivers which might have been interfering with my usb devices and created latency issues. I've used LatMon and Process Monitor to find out which drivers were causing latency issues.

2) Uninstalled Realtek sound device from the control panel -> programs and made sure it deleted Sonic Suite 2 as well. Then rebooted the pc so Windows installed its generic driver. Realtek driver was causing sound issues by itself.

Also i switched off ASmedia usb controller, intel controller and speedstep in bios settings and set energy saving plan to "perfomance" in control panel. This last step i think is not necessary and ill be switching everything back on but just in case you can try it as well.

While this may fix the issue I don't think for a premium board we should have to disable 1/2 the featuers just to get it to work. I'm about to see if I can RMA the board since the audio doesn't work as well as it should.

Kerensky18 wrote:
While this may fix the issue I don't think for a premium board we should have to disable 1/2 the featuers just to get it to work. I'm about to see if I can RMA the board since the audio doesn't work as well as it should.

Actually - its not 1/2. Not even 1/10 of the features. You are buying a premium board for the premium parts, meaning that it will last longer in theory than any other board. My last ROG motherboard lasted me 7 years and i've sold it for 30 bucks to another guy who is using it now. It had quite a lot of issues after i bought it. In fact - i couldn't even start my pc, because i had to flash a new BIOS first. Disgusting. And yet it was the most stable part in my build, working for 7 years without any issues.

AISuite never really worked. It didn't work 7 years ago and it doesn't work now. The reason for this is simple - it conflicts with just about any other software on your pc, as it uses almost all critical drivers and services to control fan speeds, voltages, overclocking, usb ports, media streaming, networking and so on. The idea seems nice in theory but on practice it just ends up hardlocking your pc more often than actually work when you use it instead of BIOS to overclock your pc. And that's just it - everything you can do in AISuite you can do in BIOS or via separate less glitchy software. Even control fan speed curve which is duplicated in BIOS and is probably the most useful feature of AISuite. In fact - software is not even a feature of the motherboard rather its an "addon". You can use it... or you don't. Back on my old motherboard - i didn't use a single Asus provided software since i also had issues with them.

As to ASMedia 3.1 usb controllers - it only controls "boost" feature of the 3.1 port. Is it an issue? Yes. It is critical? No. Does it really work anyway? No. You probably won't find a single device which will benefit from usb 3.1 speeds. The reason it might cause issues for me is because of my g19s motherboard - they didn't test and in fact warned me that it might not work. It's actually registering as 3 keyboards at once because of its LCD screen. In most situations old and incompatible hardware is the issue, not the new one.

Im not defending Asus. In fact - im annoyed and disappointed myself as both Realtek drivers, Sonic Studio and AISuite appear to remain a constant pain in the ass over the years. Same goes for RAM compatibility and BIOS - they just never get it working out of the box and take at least half a year before the motherboard is stable enough. Personally - its hard for me to move on to another brand. If you can do it - you probably should but i can guarantee that you will encounter different issues there as well. Its just how it works and how it always worked.

I think that you have a very good post, it is frustrating that the audio doesn't work. I'm going to try to do the uninstall and then use Razers audio solution to see if I can still have good positional audio. I'm on the phone with tech support at the moment.

So their suggestion so far is the newest BIOS. I'm running it now no issue. I'll try again in the morning as the issue has been intermittent in the past

Update- So even under the new BIOS I'm still having issues. I removed AI suite but I'm unable to remove Sonic Suite. The uninstall option is greyed out. When I contacted ASUS support I was informed it's a physical part of the motherboard and can't be removed >.< They didn't know it was a software or how to remove it. So, does anyone on this forum know how to remove it? All I can do is "Change" and it opens a window and the option to remove the software and the settings are greyed out there as well.