I realise this might be a long shot, but you guys can’t be any worse that the ASUS tech support people and might be able to at least point me in the right direction!
I recently bought a new motherboard (and proc, ram and hd! :)) and am using it’s onboard sound – it’s an ASUS A7N8X and uses the Nvidia Nforce 2 stuff as sound drivers among other things.
Every single game I play has moments of static in the sound and there’s not much I can do other than wait for it to stop – it lasts about 30 seconds and there’s no telling what causes it or when it’ll occur.
Another weird thing is that the Nforce drivers I installed (I tried both the ones from Nvidia’s and ASUS’s websites) both installed 9 audio devices in the multimedia section of the control panel.
I’m running a clean version of Win98 SE (almost nothing installed) on a new HD so I’m a little irked that I’m having problems already! 
Hello.
Most of the time when you have static coming from the sound card it has to do an IRQ conflict.
What you want to do is look in the control panel and sort by IRQ see if any devices are set to the same IRQ as the sound card. If so you should be able to change the IRQ settings for it in the Bios (hit delete when then computer first starts to boot up)
Let me know if you have any problems with doing it.
Phantoms.
I just wanted to elaborate a little on what Phantoms said. In order to check by IRQ:
Go into Control Panel
Go into System
Go into Device Manager
Click on View
Click on Resources by Connection
Click on IRQ
Now just look for your Audio Controller’s IRQ number. If they share a number with another device then you’ll have to go into BIOS to change it. I’m not familiar with your hardware so I can’t provide any directions.
If the IRQ number isn’t the same then we have another problem. First thing you want to do is check the simple stuff. Is the cable ok and in good condition? Is the plug secure? Do you have old and worn out speakers? Is the ports on the sound card damaged in any way? You want to rule out the simple things before you start taking your computer apart.
Let us know what you find.
I hear the NVIDIA drivers give this board problems and that the ASUS ones are better.
To check the glaringly obvious, check and be sure the plug is all the way in and wiggle it a little, see if it stops.
I tried installing the new Nvidia drivers (before I saw your post, GMRyujin) and now I’ve only got one audio device – which is good. Also, it only seems to be NOLF 2 that’s screwing up now, though I haven’t played more than 4 different games so far.
As for the IRQ’s… almost all the IRQ’s (1-15)? are shared without reporting conflicts – it’s got the audio sharing the same irq as the network card among others. Is that odd?