Sapphire Raedon AMD GPU not detected by Asus MoBo (win7 64)

As the title says my Sapphire Raedon HD 6970 (AMD) GPU is not detected by my Asus M4A78LT-M LE motherboard. This would be simply a problem with the pci port or faulty hardware normally from most of the posts i have read.

However, as I do not have a VGA cable to test the inbuilt graphics card, I connected through the HDMI port on the GPU to my screen, when I get into the windows device manager it is saying that the GPU is non existant, and the screen performance is choppy, I have updated the GPU drivers and the BIOS, I honestly have come to a dead end here, any assistance at all would be helpful, thanks.

PS. this is a fresh build, fresh hard drive with win7/64 8GB ram + AMD Phenom II x6 CPU

Hi Grift and welcome to Seven forums

If it's running through the hdmi from the card then it must be recognised in some way?

What doe's it show in device manager for displays exactly?

Cheers

Paul.

Isn't there a setting in the BIOS to turn off the on board video?

Just trying to work out what's what.

So when you fired up the new rig I assume you got no display at all? Then you switched from dvi to hdmi and you got display?

Have you tried uninstalling the only onboard display drivers from device manager? It should not hurt as windows will reinstall any missing drivers as soon as it boots up.