Don't want to diminish your work, but wouldn't it be more useful first to confirm whether the same issue happens with the original installer to eliminate a possible root cause?
Cheers
Tom
Hi Tom,
Good question, but in this case testing with the original Intel installer won't eliminate the root cause – because my updater doesn't install INF files directly. It simply downloads and runs Intel's official Chipset Device Software installer. The same Intel executable does the actual work, so the audio issue happens exactly the same way when you run Intel's own installer manually.
The problem is Intel's INF package containing cAVS (*SystemcAVS.inf) – it breaks audio on some OEM systems. My updater currently doesn't warn or block it, but
the upcoming version (2026.08.0018) will add a warning and automatically abort installation in silent mode. I can't fully fix this without physical access to a cAVS machine to analyze setupapi.dev.log and device binding changes.
Today I was cleaning out a cabinet and found an H110 chipset board. I had to scratch my head for a while because the hardware seemed completely dead – zero reaction to anything. Turned out it was a mining board with very strict voltage-related safeguards. If the RTC battery voltage drops below ~2.0V, many cheap controllers on these boards treat it as a "critical power rail error" and block POST. For comparison, most standard motherboards will start even without a battery.
After replacing the battery, everything booted fine. I also found a small bug in the updater code on H110 – if the updater detected only one HWID within the platform, instead of displaying the full ID (e.g., 1910 or 590F), it showed just the first digit (1 or 5). This has also been fixed in the new version 2026.08.0018.
Cheers
Marcin
