Nvidia card only output sound when the display is active

guering

Commendable
Jan 17, 2017
3
0
1,510
Hello, I have a GTX 980 Ti and I'm using it to output 5.1 sound to my receiver through HDMI (secondary). My main display uses a DisplayPort output.

Everything is apparently fine as long as I keep the secondary HDMI display turned on (in Nvidia Control Panel).

th1.jpg

If I choose to turn it off (which I want to, since I don't use a secondary display) the Receiver will disappear (or rather appear as "not plugged in") from the Windows 10 Playback devices.

th2.jpg

Is there a way to turn the display off and still keep using the audio feature? It may not sound that harmful to just let it there but it makes my system slower and it is really annoying when I click to open a new window and it opens in that second monitor.

Any solution that allows me to output 5.1 sound to my receiver is fine. But I can only output through the video card HDMI, as far as I know. I tried optical but it wouldn't go beyond Stereo. My Z77 Sabertooth motherboard has a hmdi port but I never used, I don't think it will output audio.

Any help is apreciated. Thanks.
 

guering

Commendable
Jan 17, 2017
3
0
1,510

That's my main display (a Samsung 4K monitor with no speakers). It does have a 3.5 audio output but that won't help me since I need 5.1. Also it only have 2 channel speaker configuration in Playback devices, suggesting that even if I could get audio from the display, it would be 2 ch only.