i am on dell inspiron and i upgraded my realtek audio through one of these downloads - dell site for my model 5559 is 6.0.1.8142 and i upgraded a while ago to 6.0.1.8339 and soon will upgrade to something in the build 8500 range when released and has been working fine for me just like i upgrade the 520 intel graphics from the intel site so you don't always have to wait for your hardware manufacturer to release drivers as they want stability for a while and if you are so inclined then you can upgrade to much newer drivers and if they don't work just roll back to the previous working driver that works
Yea, I had exactly this driver installed. (I searched for my notebook's serial number in Acer's website and downloaded/archived all of the drivers when I got the notebook, including this). It has a basic, generic Realtek Control Panel (win32 app) without any effects. For the speakers the only available effect was "Limited Output". Yesterday I installed the latest UAD driver, I'll experimenting with that if I has some free time, but I hope I get some help & recommendations with these drivers.