Computer only boots after reseating the GPU

My brother's computer has been having a problem for some time and I have finally given up on fixing it myself. So far he has a new install of vista on a new harddrive which obivously wasn't the problem since we're still having trouble. Also i've looked at the crash dumps from the few times it has froze and there is never one problem. IRQ not less or equal seems to be the most frequent but not really that prevelant.

So here's what it does now about 75% of the time when we turn it on. Boots only to the ami bios check screen or the hp splash logo and then stops. Continues this way untill the 8800 gtx is removed from its pci-e slot and the computer is booted without it. As soon as we get to the windows login screen we shut it down and reinsert the graphics card and everything works like a charm. This seems to work every single time and I have no idea what that would be reseting. I have tried removing the motherboard battery but that doesn't provide the same result. Other than that there is only an occasional freeze that happens at irregular times with the above mentioned random crash dumps.

Out of time now as I have to get to work, but will post more details and specs if anyone thinks they can help.

 

Have you tried swapping with another video card yet?

Frankly, it seems like you've narrowed down the issue.

 

Assuming nothing's overclocked and plug and play settings are normal, have you tried another PCI-E slot if you have one? It could be your PC RAM, you may want to run a memtest and see what happens. Drivers might be the issue, but I assume you are running the latest. You MIGHT want to look at your BIOS version and see if you can flash up to the latest version if your not at it already. Don't know that card too well but, maybe check it and make sure the fan's tip-top, there's solid contact between the heat sink and GPU and there's proper thermal paste spread on the GPU. You can try manually assigning/reserving the IRQ for the PCI-E card in the BIOS but this usually never works, especially on the newer mobos and Windows os. Possibly power supply issue.

After all that crap, I'd bet on the power supply flaking out or a BIOS update is required.

 

hello everybody...
thanks for sharing information....