Strange boot up behaviour after Sapphire HD6770 installed

Hi,

I have just upgraded from a Nvidia 8800GT512Mb to a Sapphire radeon HD 6770 Vapour-X GFX card.

The PC has always booted fine, even right before the upgrade so I could unistall the Nvidia drivers.

Since I added the new card I get several seconds of quiet clicking, then the system "POSTS" and all seems fine.
In harmony with the clicking I can hear something "spinning up" -( increasing in speed), then with the click sound, the "spin-up" sound slows down again. The process repeats several times until finally I then get the P.O.S.T Bleep and all is well. No problems once its up and running in Win 7.
I also notice that in sync with the "spin up" and "spin down" sounds, the glowing blue "Sapphie" logo light on the side of the GFX card brightens and dimms.

The PSU is a Corsair HX520, could it be the PSU not powerful enough?
I would be suprised as its a well known powerful PSU and the 6770 is a re-badged 5770 so power consumption is about 108W i think.
I checked connections to SATA HDD's and ROm drives and nothing is fouling fans or anything like that.
I connected the six pin modular connector from the PSU just like it was on the old 8800GT.
Could I have a faulty GFX card or maybe a bios setting to change??

Mobo = Asus P5N-E SLI
RAM = 4GB of Corsair 800Mhz
OS = Win 7 Ultimate 32-bit

So, i assume that you can get to windows somehow right?
Once it has started, download DriverSweeper and remove any left over nvidia driver chunks.
Your psu is powerful enough, but check the Pcie socket if it is suiting the gfx card very well (the little flap should close towards the socket as you place the card in).

Yes can get to Windows no problem. Pc works fine all day long after post.
I was gonna use driver sweeper but seemed like it was no longer downloadable.
Will try.

Good luck
Driver Sweeper 3.0.0 - TechSpot Downloads

It sounds like the problem occurs before the Windows drivers load, so Driver Sweeper probably won't help at all with that.

A random suggestion: make a note of all your BIOS settings. Clear the CMOS. (Use the Clear RTC jumper, as described in your P5N-E SLI manual. It's available for download from support.asus.com , if you've mislaid the paper version.)

Ahhh, Yes.

I just thought of the driver thing myself. The problem occurs before the OS is loaded so cannot be a driver issue.
Not sure I want to clear the cmos though. I had to update the bios straight away for this board so that it would recognise my E8400 C2Duo.

Had memory issues too which an update seemed to solve.

Ok. I fixed it.

You promted me to check the Asus site for BIOS updates and guess what.. the latest update (Nov 2009) said "update due to delayed boot with some AMD graphics cards".

I flashed the bios with a floppy disc (god what are they again!) and now all is well and it "POST"s within seconds.

Cheers!

byngo said:

Ok. I fixed it.

You promted me to check the Asus site for BIOS updates and guess what.. the latest update (Nov 2009) said "update due to delayed boot with some AMD graphics cards".

I flashed the bios with a floppy disc (god what are they again!) and now all is well and it "POST"s within seconds.

Cheers!

Thanks for posting that.

I guess I should check my bios. I have never had to do that before. I went from a HD 4850 to a XFX HD 6770 and it does exactly as you describe...delayed boot but works very well once W7 loaded. Is there a quick way to find out bios update? I have a HP Pavilion a6130n. Thanks for any help and thanks again for posting!!!

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