As I mentioned the other day, I've just put togeter my new Athlon 64 X2 Linux system. The install went okay, but when I got around to connecting speakers I didn't hear anything. I ran in to this before and it was just a muted sound channel. So I ran alsamixer and made sure everything was turned up to around 70%. Nothing. Someone on a forum said they had the same chipset and their problem went away with a reboot. I don't believe in rebooting to fix things on Linux, but I was busy having a conversation at the same time so I tried it. I noticed that there was a sound played when I logged in to KDE. The thing is, there was also a high-pitched, shrill screeching noise at the same time. I tested the speakers on another computer and they were fine. I tried tweaking the volume in KMix and after that no sounds played for anything. I got it working in the end, for the short answer just skip to the end. Of course I have to relate my experience before I can bring myself to just spit it out though... I went through the YaST hardware configuration for the sound card, removed the settings, reinstalled it. YaST detects the hardware as MCP51 and uses the snd-hda-intel driver. This seemed to be the right driver but the lack of any mention of Nvidia had me wondering for a while. After fooling with YaST settings for long enough I found that the sound worked, albeit with the loud squeak, when I ran rcalsasound restart or used the YaST gui to restart ALSA. It would work until I adjusted the volume on any channel or muted anything. After that I got dead silence. Okay, enough for characterizing the problem, I finally dug up someone who'd gotten in to the guts of the problem and solved it. Here's the thread at PlanetAMD64. It comes down to just adding one line to modprobe.conf. On my fresh SUSE install I didn't want to break anything (including uninstallers) so I made the change in /etc/modprobe.conf.local . This file is empty by default and is there for your own changes. Mine now looks like this: # # please add local extensions to this file # # rjr - added for sound card options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack I notice those option names are the same as the ones in the YaST dialog, so you could probably fix it by setting the values in that tool instead.