Cursed 5850 of Doom

[d1am0nd g33z3r]

Right,

The new 5850 in the sig below has ended up being RMA'd; didn't work in my rig and didn't work in the test rig at my mate's shop, so back it goes.

In the meantime I've had to fall back on my old 7900GS (the 8800 the 5850 is replacing is fried and gone to GPU heaven) but since having the 5850 in the case everything seems to be all screwy. There may be a problem with boot devices in addition to the following problem, but one thing at a time eh.

Main symptom atm is that it cycles through the VGA bios splash 3 times before it gets to the motherboard bios (about 5 second delay between cycles), which immediately makes me suspicious of anything that happens after.

Can anyone offer an opinion as to if this is a gfx or mobo issue? Anyone seen anything similar before? I'm stumped, tried just about everything I can think of, including my old PSU (exactly the same behaviour) and currently it's stripped down to just mobo, cpu, gfx and one stick of RAM (tried all 3 sticks in a variety of slots).

It's all very confusing as the exact same configuration had run just fine for about 2 months prior to attempting to install the 5850. Any chance a faulty card could have fried something somewhere?

All guidance and opinions gratefully received.

 

[555BUK]

I had a similar issue with my P6T-SE and first 5870. Sometimes the pc would restart 3 or 4 times before seeing BIOS splash screen and other times it was fine. In the end I solved the issue by updating my P6T-SE BIOS to the latest available on ASUS'' website.

 

[d1am0nd g33z3r]

Excellent suggestion, thanks. Flashed bios to latest rev (1201) which has occurrenced the following:

a) It exhibits exactly the same behaviour as before except:
b) The bios no longer sees my hard drive if I plug it in

This is par for the course this weekend, whatever I try it seems to throw up a new and different problem. As I said though, one thing at a time, I'd settle for some progress on the multi-posting VGA bios issue as a first step. The only time this does not occurr is immediately after a bios reset, any changes to any of the bios settings (including even the date & time I think) and it immediately starts misbehaving again.

Maybe this should be in General but don't want to cross-post eh. I've currently got everything out of the case except mobo, gfx and one stick of RAM. I'll try some other bios revs and see what happens.

Any other suggestions?