paavonurmi

Water cooling and Gentle Typhoon fans is how you get a quiet system. I have 7 case fans hooked to a fan controller and can hardly hear them sitting right next to my system. The Gentle Typhoons undervolt very good, and their static pressure is great. The ultimate noisless computer is one sumbmerged in mineral oil.

Check for grounding problems with the mobo: Make sure ALL of the mobo stand offs are in place. Check the I/O shield to make sure it's not grounding on the mobo. You could reintall Win 7 and try it again. Try unistalling/disable raid drivers. I think your mobo has USB 3, not sure if that could cause any problems. It's a pain, but a common way to test things is pull the mobo out, put it on a piece of plastic, use just one stick of RAM and test it that way.

Is your soundcard PCI, or PCI-express ? Did you try and re seat the card ? Look in control panel>sound and make sure things you don't want are disabled. I'm not familiar with your sound card, but on my Ht Omega I have issues with sound cutting out when using 192 Khz, but if I set it to 96 Khz I don't have that problem ( optical out being used ). Do you have settings like that on your card ? Use CCleaner to unistall any Realtek audio drivers( or whatever ones came with the Mobo ), just turning on board sound off in the BIOS will not unistall the software. Did you try and reinstall the soundcard drivers ? It's a pain, but use a driver sweaper in safe mode to clean out and the soundcard drivers, then reinstall. It sounds like a driver/software issue. The other thought is the Asus soundcards are shielded, so maybe it's some interference from the mobo. My Ht Omega is not shielded and have no issues with my rig. EVGA e758 mobo i7 920 @4.0Ghz 2x EVGA 570 video cards.

If you did a default install of the Nivida drivers for the 560ti then you installed the HD sound drivers for the video card. Re-install the nvidia drivers and choose "custom" install. Make sure the HD sound is unchecked, and if you are not doing 3D then go ahead and uncheck it also. I would do a clean install of the video drivers to make sure the HD drivers are out of there. If you are using the HMDI port and your monitor has speakers built in, make sure to disable them