I've just put together a new system and am getting a 7F code on my eVga 750i board. I've read this means "waiting for user input", I press F1, code switches to FF, which I'm told means everything is fine. However, nothing ever shows on my monitor.

During this, I hear a revving noise 2 or 3 times while the post port debug LED cycles through various 2 digit codes (about 15 of them, rapidly).

THis is my first time building with a mobo with this feature, any help on what might be the issue would be appreciated.

you may have to disable the floppy drive if you dont have one. I know I ran into an issue like this when I first started it up...the revving noise could be your video card fan before coming back down to a slower speed? could also be your HDD spinning up.

ya I just determined it's definitely the video card revving up.

I just took everything out of the case, set the mobo on the carpet and tried 1 stick of RAM at a time, floppy, opticals and HD's unconnected.

With one stick of RAM, it just 'revs' (the video card, very loud) constantly and nothing shows on the monitor.

With the other stick of RAM, it boots and I'm able to get into the BIOS, but the screen has random apostrophes all over it just like it did on my previous platform. The only parts I'm reusing on this system are my albatron 7950 GX2 and 650W seasonic energy+

On my previous system I thought the motherboard was bad (as told by a geeks on time tech), RMA'd it twice, system still didn't boot. Before failing to boot altogether, the previous sytem also had these random apostrophes.

So it's looking like the only part that is bad is the one I didn't replace, vid card.

Can you boot from CD? Try running memtest86+ and see if you get any errors with the RAM. If you get just one error, the memory stick(s)/ DIMM slots are bad. Process of elimination will tell you which.

I remember when I tried to overclock my video card too much, I got those apostrophe's all over the screen and couldnt do anything. Take out the video card and try booting in safe mode as to not use the video card. Check back if you find anything.

ya, I've been able to boot from cd, install windows, and boot into windows fine. Though I have had 3 blue screens of death. Upon reboot, windows told me the cause of failure were the drivers for my 7950GX2.