New 896's or a new motherboard?

[jaredhassan]

I've got an issue that is new to me. I work at a studio in NYC and since our inception we've been using the Legacy 896's. We've occasionally have had to send one to be repaired/replaced, usually the just completely stop working, or won;t come out of the initial flash mode when turned on, and that's how we know they've gone bad. A while back, all the machines were updated to Win 7 64 bit, with 64 bit motherboards, and never have I seen professional audio run so well and smooth on PC's. Recently, though, without a change of settings, or any known power surges, one pair of 896's will not sync when running audio through our DAW. They work perfectly individually, but not together. We've even changed the 1394 cards and wires, added memory, took away memory, reinstalled and uninstalled and installed drivers & software-you know, all the little things one can do before doing something big. We feel convinced it's not the MOTU's, so we think it must be the PCI slots-a possible marker of the mother board about to go. Has anyone else had an experience like this ever, or even recently? Is there any way to check the PCI slots for malfunction? I'll leave the specs of the machine below. Thanks!

Jared (jared.h.foles@gmail.com)

Custom AMD Athlon Athlon x2 64 bit System
MSI K9vgm-v motherboard-3gb memory 1000 mhz FSB
two legacy 896's-both plugged in directly to machine
TI chip 1394 card
2 pci 2.3 slots (one empty, one with the firewire card)
Windows 7 Ultimate-64bit