I'm having the same problem. I recently purchased a xfx hydra edition pre-water blocked. The windows logo comes and goes but the desktop never appears. The system either resets or the card just stops. I've tried re-installing the drivers, beta drivers and older drivers. If I run it with basic windows vga drivers it works... in a limited fashion.
I live in New Zealand and the card was imported from the U.S so doing an RMA is not really an option
Did a solution for this problem ever happen?
I7 4790k
MSI Gaming 9 AC
32gb Corsair DDR3
Seasonic 1050x PSU
Crucial 240gb m.2 ssd
Windows 7 Pro 64bit