OK.

First, it should be possible to get a Realtek on-motherboard sound chip working with Sonar. On-board sound chips can generally handle playback, but will be far from ideal, especially if you meed to record audio or play a software synthesiser in Sonar using a MIDI controller, but you say you don't need to do that.

ASIO drivers provide, amongst other things, a very low level of delay between playing a note on a controller and it emerging from a software synthesiser, amongst other things. Again, you say you don't need to do that so don't worry about it at the moment, let's just get sound working. In any case, there are no ASIO drivers for Realtek that I'm aware of, amd the freeware ASIO4ALL driver which can sometimes be persuaded to work with Realtek is very hit and miss, difficult to configure and can itself cause all kinds of problems if present on the system.

So. First, go into Windows control panel/device manager and locate the AMD HDMI audio device. Right click on it and disable it (do not uninstall it, just disable it or Windows will spot it and re-install it automatically) Having graphics-card relayed HDMI drivers (which are mostly intended for playing hi-def video/audio on a home theatre system) active can confuse things.

Now make sure that there is nothing running that might use the sound card so that Sonar can have sole access to it. It's also a good idea to go into the control panel/sounds settings and tell Windows not to use any system sounds at all. That will (hopefully) prevent Windows from grabbing the sound card and denying access to Sonar or making unwanted noises at the wrong time.

Open Sonar go into Sonar's preferences and set the pull-down for audio driver to WDM or MME -

You should then see the realtek listed under audio devices. Select it as output and input device.

Now open a new project, call it 'test' or something similar. To check you've got audio working try dragging a wave (not mp3) file into the project and playing it back. If all is well and correctly routed you should now get sound.

To get MIDI playback in Sonar you need two things. One is a MIDI track containing the MIDI data and the other is an audio track with a software synthesiser (such as TT100) in the fx bin. The output of the MIDI track should be set to point to the software synth and the output of the audio track should point to the master bus which in turn should be routed to the realtek.

Sonar is very powerful but has a bit of a steep initial learning curve. I strongly suggest you work through the help tutorials to do with the basics of getting things working, MIDI and software synths as these will take you through things a step at a time.

Here are the step by step instructions for setting up SONAR Artist using integrated audio chips https://www.cakewalk.com/...p;product=SONAR+Artist

   Thanks for the suggestions.  None of them worked. I went to EDIT>PREFERENCES>PLAYBACK AND RECORDING AND SELECTED WDM/KS to the right of DRIVER MODE:  I clicked "Apply" and a window came up - SILENT BUSES DETECTED, a paragraph under it yada yada, and a box under that that is blank except for the letter A in the upper left corner.  You have my utmost awe and respect if this means anything whatsoever to you.  Anyway, nothing changed.  Still no sound.

That means you have a project with buses in it that go nowhere. Simply delete them or redirect their outputs. In your case its most likely delete is the best way to go. 
 
You probably had all the audio device outs selected when under MME or what driver that sound chip has. With WDM/KS it sees only one stereo out. So now you need to tell Sonar to get rid of the useless outs.  

One other thing is you're attempting to solve several issues simultaneously. This will eat your time and cause frustration. I'd recommend narrowing down what's going on. Start with sound first - create a new project and insert an audio track and drag some audio clips to it and hit play. If you get sound from that then you know the interface is working and you can proceed accordingly.

swamptooth
One other thing is you're attempting to solve several issues simultaneously. This will eat your time and cause frustration. I'd recommend narrowing down what's going on. Start with sound first - create a new project and insert an audio track and drag some audio clips to it and hit play. If you get sound from that then you know the interface is working and you can proceed accordingly.

Great point. It can be very hard to tackle so many problems all at once.  

ampfixer
Luke, if you don't want to use an external sound card that supports ASIO then you will never get the full performance of the software. If you want to use the Realtek sound chip you should use the WDM driver option. I could run 8.5 on a laptop with REaltek and WDM but I don't know if the X series will work that way. Best of luck.

It's not always a given that Realtek chips will work with WDM/KS. On an older computer it would only do MME. Don't know about what they can do with Windows 8.1 computers.
 
 

They work under wasapi mode perfectly fine. The one area that's lacking is the microphone is set to 16bit and can't be changed even though the options in windows recording devices lists higher bit rates. This in turn lowers audio outs to 16 bit. Solution in sonar is to disable realtek input device so you can set 24 bit output on the speakers.

He also should cut off any other apps on his pc that would run in the background that can cause interference while using Sonar... such as turn off your internet and perhaps your virus software. And in his case his best bet would be to get ASIO4ALL since he refuses to spring for an audio interface.

Asio4all wreaks havoc with all the new realtek chipsets since their drivers are built around the wasapi specs and not the old wdm. Wdm mode in windows 8 is an just emulator of the original wdm mode that talks to wasapi so what you wind up with is asio4all wrapping itself around a wdm wrapper to get to wasapi. Seriously bad bad idea.