Some weird things going on. Asus Maximus V Formula Z77

So we had a thunderstorm recently which made the power flick on and off, and while it was rebooting I pulled the power on it because I was fearing a power surge. When I turned it back on after the storm everything seemed ok so I dismissed I carried on, then maybe an hour later I remembered to set the X.M.P. profile because my RAM was running at the 1600MHz for a month because I kept forgetting to change it. I set it to the 9-10-9-27 at 1866MHz and it was perfectly stable, as it should have been. I then went to sleep and the next afternoon everything was weird. The LAN port wouldn't recognize my cable and the audio would lag by about 300 milliseconds on YouTube and in VLC, I was able to get the internet working again by doing a bunch of restarts and playing with my router, but that didn't solve the audio problem. I then thought it could be the RAM, so I cleared the CMOS and it was all back to the way it was before, no X.M.P., but the audio problem was still there. I unistalled Realtek's drivers and that made the problem go away, but it's disappointing because a good portion of the cost to produce this Mobo is the Supreme FX IV audio, and was hoping to skip out on a sound card this build but it appears I will need one because the Windows drivers suck . I just wanted OCN's thoughts on this, because I have three more days to RMA my motherboard with Newegg, and was wondering if I should be concerned with it in the future.

P.S. I ran Memtest86+ for 12 hours with X.M.P. on and it found no errors.
P.P.S. My Asus GTX 680 has been crashing constantly, and I'm RMA'ing it but this was happening before the storm, could be a MoBo problem???

Thanks guys!!!
Edited by SammichThyme - 8/7/12 at 4:40pm

Yes, it was ok for about an hour then it slowly started lagging and then got back to where it was.

But there is no problem with Windows drivers, just Realtek's. I'm really don't know what to think.

Also, I constantly get the message AO on my motherboard, I didn't think anything of it but I'm not sure, is it actually an error message? I'm looking for the Mobo manual to check.

AO stands for IDE Initialization is started, any ideas anybody? Now I have an OEM copy of Windows, so I would have to buy a new copy if I got a new motherboard? Bleh. Maybe I'll just call Microsoft and explain the situation.

Never mind, AO is normal

Bumping for hope.

Last bump, I will keep it if nobody stands up. It's too much of a hassle to send back and I don't think it's worth it.