Palit HD 4870x2 & Asus Maximus Extreme corruption

system spec's:
- O/S: Vista Home Premium SP1 64bit ENG
- VGA: Palit HD 4870x2 2gb
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83ghz)
- MB: Asus Maximus Extreme; tried both bios 1007 & 1104 (most recent version)
- PSU: Corsair HX-1000 (1000w)
-Monitor: HP w2408h (24"screen)
-Hard Drive: 2 Samsung sata 320gb drives
-Memory: 4x1gb Crucial Ballistix ddr3-1333

Hi,

I have built a new system and am having problems with I believe either the

graphics card or the combination of the graphics card & the motherboard.

The symptoms are that from power-on, first the boot up is super slow- taking

a minute or two to reach the bios screen and then a couple minutes to reach

the operating system and the operating system taking ~5 minutes to load( when

it is able to.)


All the while, once I have hit the bios screen (so I have video at that

point, before that the monitor is in sleep mode) I have graphic artifacts -

mainly a series of thin & medium thick white horizontal lines in a vertical

grill pattern across the entire screen as well as 3, 2-3 inch thick grey

bands running vertically one on each side and the middle. When I am supposed

to have a mostly black screen (like when the raid chipset messaging appears

after the main bios splash screen), the screen is mostly a faded white - I

can just make out the text that is supposed to be there, the same thing

happens when I hit the Windows splash screen _ can make out the loading

windows bar, but the screen is mostly a faded white.


On the occasions I can get into Windows (sometimes the systems reboots during

the above process) I am in a super low resolution and 4-bit color mode and

the bars/grill artifacts appear to be there overlayed over the screen,

although it is difficult to tell due to the resolution - most Windows menu's

are only half legible- but Windows operations seem to run at the correct

speed and I am able to say, surf the internet (with artifacts). If I attempt

to install the ATI drivers and reboot, the system will crash at Windows and I

have to do safe mode to get back in.


In an attempt to diagnose the problem I bought a Nvidia 6200 64mb TurboCache

card (since it was the cheapest PCI Express card I could find); When I

removed the HD 4870x2 and installed the 6200 and booted up, everything worked

properly- boot up was fast and I was in Windows within 1 minute with

everything running smoothly.


I re-installed the HD 4870x2 while keeping the 6200 installed and with the

monitor plugged into the 6200 everything ran well again, but if I switched

the monitor to the HD 4870x2, I was back to the super slow, corrupted

graphics boot up. With the 6200 in, Windows recognized the HD 4870x2, but as I understand it,

Vista will only allow 1 type of graphics card to be in use at a time and

would not allocate system resources to the HD 4870x2, I was not able to do

much with it.


My questions are:

1) Is this a definite case of a bad graphics card? - I wonder because I would

think that a bad graphics card would give no video or corrupted video, but

not slow the power-up / bios down to a crawl.


2) Are there any tests I can run on the graphics card; I have not had to do

an RMA on any previous systems I have built, but I like to be prepared when I

have to speak to tech support.


3) Does anyone have any experience with the HD 4870x2 & the Asus Maximus

Extreme motherboard and if you have them working together which bios are you

using?


4) Any suggestions on other causes of the problem(s) - maybe I am off-track

completely, as I am not that knowledgeable about the technology.


Thank you in advance for your time.

I have this board & card & the exact same problems. Please let me know if u find a fix. Thx.