@stephenw10 Yeah agreed and this is a good fix for now.
At least I fully know what is going on now as well.
It's a bit sloppy for me to go and leave an audio interface enabled.
But I figured it didn't matter as PFsense shouldn't load any drivers for the audio interface as far as I know.
This problem could come back if the BIOS is ever reset or defaulted for any reason, but I at least will know what to do in that rare event.
ASUS consumer motherboards like to mildly overclock some settings by default.
This occasionally results in a failed boot and a "hit F1" to load defaults message which would re-enable the audio.
I'm not worried about it and it will get fixed in a future update obviously.
I already knew what I was getting into building a box on a consumer AMD light gaming motherboard LOL.
Incidentally the Realtek NIC is doing great!
A little slower than the dual Intel server NIC (as expected) that is also installed.
And the Realtek is only going to be used for very rare management of the web interface and SSH.
I did put it through a series of long multi-hour high bandwidth testing to see if I could make it fail
and it did just fine before taking it out of the routing mix.
The install was planned to disable it and install another NIC if it gave any problems.
The hit was minimal and could have been far worse!
Thanks!!