Scanimage 2017 : Issue getting NI Flex Rio Chassis to work

In some of the computers we have, the OS/PC hangs on power up if the MXI card is in place in the PC, and the 1073 chassis is connected and on.

I have tried several different slots in that computer and none of them work. In a similar but different computer, with a slightly different mother board, no problem. I am recalling the problems I had with having to put this
card in a particular slot of a different machine. However, in that case, I think the computer booted fine, I just could not see the 1073 chassis.

Is this a common problem with certain computers/mother boards?

Is there something I need to change in BIOS?

Is this part of the reason why you guys decided to start selling PCs?

The MXI link issue is quite a common problem with NI PXI chassis. The MXI link is essentially a PCIe to PCIe bridge. Not all motherboard vendors implement support for this in their BIOS correctly.

The safest way to get around this is to use a computer / motherboard that has proven to work before (one of the reasons why we sell ScanImage optimized computers).

Here are few things to try:

Update your BIOS
Try different PCIe slots in your PC
Reference the NI troubleshooting guide: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/484F81E6570AD803862569ED007AAA41
NI has a 'BIOS compatibility tool' that works around some common BIOS problems: http://www.ni.com/download/mxi-express-bios-compatibility-software-1.5/3764/en/

The problem is related to the fact that not all the PCIe slots are turned on by default. With many motherboards the PCIe slots share lanes.

So for example, if you are going to do 3-way SLI, you might have one 16x graphics card and two 8x graphics cards taking up 32 PCIe lanes. For that particular motherboard there are only 32 PCIe lanes. Thus the rest of the slots on the motherboard must be turned off.

Take care when changing settings for the PCIe lanes in the BIOS. This is specific to each motherboard and CPU.

Different CPUs can handle different numbers of PCIe lanes. So you really have to look both at the CPU and motherboard specifications.

This Intel link (http://ark.intel.com/products/82931/Intel-Core-i7-5930K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz) shows that the 5930K processor has 40 lanes for example. Each Intel processor can be looked up on their website to get these specs.

NI recommends, DELL or HP computers and guarantees compatibility with these.

You see there are several factors and the short answer to the last question is yes that is one of the reasons we started selling computers. Other reasons relate to the fact that we could not find a computer that Dell or HP sold off the shelf that would be optimized for ScanImage. We built a few computers in house and tested until we found an optimal configuration.