Sound Card Issue - ASUS Sonar Essence STX II not being recognized on MSI Z97 G5

[wigglestheworm]

Just put together my first gaming computer Friday but I wanted dedicated audio. The Sonar Essence STX II got great reviews, but the computer is not recognizing it. To list:

1) Sound card is installed in the bottom-most PCIe slot (to give space from the GPU). When I go into the MSI Boot Up menu and look at a map of the motherboard it shows the sound card installed there (so it's recognized)
2) It's connected directly to the PSU so it should have power
3) I have tried to install the sound card drivers with the onboard audio enabled AND disabled (confirmed by its listing disappearing from Device Manager) to no avail

Essentially, the sound card does not show up in device manager -- all I see are two from my GPU (GeForce 970) and the onboard audio when it's enabled -- and when I run the driver software from ASUS it asks me to Install it though it's already on the motherboard and connected to power.

ASUS customer support has been especially unhelpful and I don't want to spend weeks returning a new sound card only to find the replacement also doesn't work. I believe this could be a software issue since I've read about issues other motherboards have trouble accepting sound cards. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

 

[popatim]

Make sure your bios has the CPU PCIe lane configuration set to Auto or manaully make sure that 3rd slot gets assigned lanes (ie- x8,x4,x4 mode)
Personally I would move the sound card to one of the x1 slots so I could keep my gpu's in x8/x8 mode. Those lanes come from the chipset whereas the x16 slots get them from the cpu.

 

[wigglestheworm]

Thanks popatim. The bios showed the PCIe configuration set to auto originally, but even changing it to x8,x4,x4 did not help.

Is there a way to check if the sound card is getting power even if my computer doesn't recognize it? I have read that the 4 pin connections can be touchy and I'll be annoyed if ultimately it's a just bad connection.