Graphics card or monitor problem...please help!

Brian8377

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May 5, 2012
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***To administrators...this post was deleted earlier, I presume by mistake? If there's something wrong with it please let me know what the problem is and not just that it's been removed.***

Hey guys! I have a problem I was hoping someone could help me with... I have a music studio PC that's having possible graphics card issues. The problem I'm having is when I first fire up the PC, I don't see the windows logo coming together like I used to while windows starts. It just pops up to the desktop...but then only for a second and most of the time with artifacts. Then it goes blank again (as if the video card is re-scanning, like it does when you plug in another monitor) for a few seconds to as much as a minute and when it returns it might be ok, or it may still be flickering/with artifacts and it will go through the process again. Eventually, it usually will be stable without the flickering or artifacts and once it's stable it stays that way till reboot. Sometimes I get tired of waiting for it and do a hard reboot and then it seems to recover much quicker.

Originally, I had a Radeon 6850 running 4 monitors, but it was really noisy and I didn't need all that graphics power for audio production. So, to cut down on PC noise, I put in an Nvidia NVS-450 Quadro passive card. This card worked great and was silent. Then I decided to get rid of my two 27" monitors and get the LG 34UM95 with 3440x1440 resolution...the problem was that the nvs450 wouldn't support that resolution. So, I bought the Sapphire Ultimate R7 250 which is also passive cooled to drive it.

I had concerns about going from AMD to Nvidia back to AMD, who knows what kind of driver issues I could be having. I'm wondering if anyone has had this problem before? Also, is there a way to clean all the drivers out and start over with those to make sure there's no driver interference?

My machine is as follows:

Windows 7 Professional
Intel i7 3930K
Asus Sabertooth X79 mobo
G.Skill Ripjawz 32gigs
Corsair AX850 gold power supply
Samsung SSD system drive and several SSD data drives

I don't have onboard graphics on the mobo, so I would have to be able to do this without having that to plug into. Also, I'm trying to stay away from having to reload windows so I don't lose anything on the music side of things. Thanks for all your suggestions!