Split the problem at the rear jack before you go anywhere near a driver download
Plug headphones into the rear jacks on the I/O panel before you do anything else. If they work there and not at the front of the case, the codec, the driver and Windows are all fine and you have a front panel problem — a cable, a header, or a cable that was never plugged in. If the rear jacks are silent too, work down the same list ASUS publishes: the Windows output device first, because it is the most common cause and involves no hardware; then the audio driver; then the BIOS entry that can switch the onboard audio controller off entirely.
The instinct with no sound is to go hunting for a driver. That is the third thing to check, not the first, because there is a thirty-second test that cuts the problem in half and needs nothing downloaded.
Your board has two sets of analog outputs and they are not wired the same way. The rear jacks are soldered to the board on the I/O panel and run straight to the audio codec. The front panel jacks on the case are a cable, running from the chassis to a header on the board. That is two different paths sharing one codec, and knowing which one is broken decides everything you do next.
| Rear jacks work, front does not | The board, the codec, the driver and Windows are all working. Go to the front panel header. |
| Neither works | A system-wide problem. Work down the output device, the driver and the BIOS in that order. |
| Both silent, but HDMI or a USB headset plays | The analog path is the suspect and the rest of the machine is fine. See when it is actually the board. |
ASUS puts the same check first in its own troubleshooting article, before any mention of software: "Confirm whether the speaker being inserted to the correct port." Its next step is to confirm the board noticed the plug at all — "Open [Realtek Audio Console] AP and click [Device advanced settings]", then "Confirm if [Front Speaker Out] was detected as below picture" for speakers, or "Confirm [Headphone] is detected as below picture" for headphones. A jack the console never registers is a different problem from one that registers and stays quiet.
People searching for this problem almost always describe it by colour — the green one. We have not printed a colour-to-function table on this page because we could not source one: ASUS's article says "the correct port" and shows a picture rather than naming a colour standard, and we are not going to reproduce a convention from memory on a page whose whole job is to be checked against. The rear panel layout for your specific board is printed in its manual, and that is the diagram to read.
This is the first thing to check once you know the rear jacks are involved, and it is the one with no hardware component at all. A modern PC has several places sound can come out of. As our audio codec guide puts it, if your sound leaves the machine over USB, over HDMI or DisplayPort, or into an external DAC, the board's codec is not in the signal path at all. A monitor connected over HDMI or DisplayPort is an audio output as far as Windows is concerned, whether or not it has speakers worth using.
So the machine may be playing perfectly, into something you are not listening to. ASUS's instruction is to make the two ends match: "Confirm the output device matches with your Audio device. (For example ,you insert Speaker, please select Speakers(Realtek(R) Audio))" — that is, if the headphones are in the board's jack, the selected output has to be the board's audio device and not the monitor.
It is worth checking this one twice, because it re-breaks itself. Plugging in a monitor, a dock or a USB headset can move the default output, and it moves without telling you.
If the right device is selected and the jacks are still silent, the driver is next. ASUS's route is Device Manager: "Right click Windows startup menu and select [Device Manager]", then "Confirm [Realtek USB Audio] driver was installed or not", and "Click [Realtek USB Audio] and click [Driver]" to read the version that is loaded.
The instruction that follows is the actionable half: "If you don't install driver or the driver installed is not the latest version, please install the latest version by this FAQ". Downloads are per-board, not per-chipset, so you need the exact model — including the WiFi, DDR4 or DDR5 and revision suffix, since those are separate products with separate download pages. Our guide to identifying your motherboard model covers reading it off the board and out of Windows.
Realtek USB Audio is what appears in Device Manager on the board ASUS used to illustrate this article. It reads as odd on a desktop until you know that some Realtek codecs attach over USB internally rather than over the HD-Audio link — the ALC4080 and ALC4082, which our codec guide covers. On a board with an HD-Audio codec the entry is named differently, and we have no source that says what, so check what is actually listed on your machine rather than searching for that exact string.
One thing we have deliberately not written here: what a fresh Windows install gives you before you install anything. It is a reasonable question and we could not source an answer to it, so this page does not state one. ASUS's article does not describe the default state either — it tells you to confirm what is installed and to install the latest if that is not what you have.
If the rear jacks work and the front ones do not, nothing above is your problem. The front panel jacks are a separate path: a cable from the case, ending in a single block plug, which goes onto a header on the motherboard. ASUS's manual for the ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II describes it in one sentence: "The front panel audio header is for a chassis-mounted front panel audio I/O module that supports HD Audio. Connect one end of the front panel audio I/O module cable to this header."
The same manual adds a recommendation about which kind of module to use: "We recommend that you connect a high-definition front panel audio module to this connector to avail of the motherboard's high-definition audio capability."
On that board the header is labelled AAFP on the silkscreen and in the connector diagram, and the specification table lists it as "1 x Front Panel Audio header (AAFP)". That is where the acronym comes from, and it is why searching a manual for "AAFP" finds the section faster than searching for "audio".
Three things go wrong here, and the first is the most common by a distance.
ASUS's troubleshooting article routes front panel headphones to a separate illustration for this reason — "If the headphone is connected to the front panel, refer to below picture." The front path gets its own check because it is a different set of causes, not a variation on the rear one.
AAFP is what ASUS prints on the board quoted above. We have not sourced what the other vendors print on theirs, so this page does not claim it is universal. Look for the header your own manual identifies as the front panel audio connector; the name beside it varies and the manual is the thing that settles it.
The onboard audio controller can be switched off in the BIOS, and a board with it off behaves like a board with no audio hardware — no device to select, nothing for a driver to bind to. It is rarely off by accident, but it is worth ruling out before you conclude the board is faulty, and it is the last step in ASUS's own article. Their four steps, verbatim:
Note what that setting is called. USB Audio Controller is ASUS's name for the entry on the board this article illustrates, and it lines up with the Realtek USB Audio device name in the section above: a codec that attaches over USB internally gets an entry that says so. On boards with an HD-Audio codec the entry under Onboard Device Configuration is not named that, and we have no source for what it is named, so read the menu rather than hunting for that string.
The Delete key, the F7 route into Advanced Mode, the Onboard Device Configuration page and the F10 save are all ASUS's BIOS, quoted from ASUS's article. MSI, GIGABYTE and ASRock each lay their firmware out differently and use their own names for the audio entry. We could not read their documentation to source those names, so we have not guessed at them — on a non-ASUS board, look for an audio or onboard-devices entry in the equivalent advanced section, and take the key names from the prompts your own BIOS prints on screen.
If you do change it, F10 is what commits it. A setting toggled and then left by powering off is a setting that was never changed.
Reach this last. Every cause above is more common than a failed codec, and several of them present identically to one.
You have got here legitimately if the rear jacks are silent as well as the front ones, the correct output device is selected, a current driver is installed and listed in Device Manager, and the audio controller is enabled in the BIOS. At that point one more test is worth doing, because it is the one that separates a broken analog path from a broken machine.
Play something over HDMI, DisplayPort or a USB headset. As our codec guide sets out, those paths do not go through the board's audio codec at all. If sound comes out over one of them and never over the jacks, everything from the operating system down to the output stage is working and the fault is confined to the analog section — which is a far narrower conclusion than "no sound", and a much better thing to tell a support desk. If nothing plays over any path, the problem is more likely to be somewhere in Windows than in the codec, and the output device check is worth another look.
We are not going to print a verdict beyond that. ASUS's article ends at the BIOS check and states no hardware conclusion, and we have no source that describes what a failed onboard codec looks like or when to call a board dead. If you get to the end of this list with silent jacks and working HDMI audio, the next step is your board vendor's support channel, with that split as the thing you tell them.
Every quoted sentence on this page comes from the two ASUS documents linked below, read on 9 September 2026: the troubleshooting article for the software and BIOS steps, and the ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II user manual, read as a PDF, for the front panel audio header. Nothing here is a test result: no board was booted, no headphones were plugged into anything, and no configuration was measured. The BIOS menu names, the Device Manager entry and the AAFP label are all ASUS's, on the specific boards ASUS used, and are reproduced as examples rather than as rules that hold across vendors. We could not source the other vendors' BIOS menu names, the rear panel jack colour convention, or what audio driver a fresh Windows install provides, so this page states none of those three.
AAFP diagram labelPublished 9 September 2026. Both ASUS documents quoted above were read on 9 September 2026.