Hopefully someone has a solution to this rather baffling problem:

I purchased an RME HDSPe MADI card last week to go in a 1U rack mounted PC that I've built for it. The motherboard in the case is an Intel DQ45CB mATX board which has 2x PCIe-x1 slots and a single PCIe-x16 slot.

I installed it in the top x1 slot and the card was recognised and the correct drivers installed without problems. However, no audio is passed from the card to any software. Neither the RME mixer/digicheck software nor my DAW software (Reaper) receive audio from the card, when I know the MADI input is good (tested with a SADiE system).

However, when the card is moved to the x16 slot it works perfectly; audio is completely fine. Upon moving the card back to either of the two x1 slots it still works perfectly, eliminating the initial difficulties.

This is only a problem because I've recently purchased two more systems, using even smaller motherboards (Zotac H55 mini-ITX boards). The same thing happens when I install the card in the single slot: card is recognised and the drivers install, but no audio is passed. In this case however, there are no other slots to move the card to in order to check it.

I know the x16 slots work, because graphics cards work fine. I know it's not a single board fault, because the same behaviour occurs not just in both Zotac boards, but initially in the Intel board aswell.

Unfortunately as these are not 'enthusiast' motherboards, the BIOS does not have a huge amount of settings regarding PCIe slots or for turning on/off the onboard audio, so I cannot check if that is the problem.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Has anyone come across this before? For the record I'm using Windows 7 on Intel X25 SSDs throughout, with no other PCIe cards in either system other than the RME MADI card.

Thanks

Dan