Help needed: New rig slow and no vid card?

[poom]

Hi all,

I recently assembled this rig:

AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition
8gig (4gx2) Ripjaw ram
Biostar TA890FXE mobo
Corsair TX 750watt PSU
Sapphire Radeon HD 5870
Using old hard drives
Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Installing Windows 7 took about 3 hours. Now whenever I open a window, installer CD, anything at all - it takes forever. It's like this computer is 7 years old with 20 viruses on it. I installed the chipset drivers that came with my CPU, and also the drivers that came with my 5870. I am getting an error that reads: No ATI graphics driver installed, or the ATI driver is not functioning properly. Please install the ATI driver appropriate for your ATI hardware.

EDIT: I also switched the vid card to another PCI slot, the same thing is happening.

Any thoughts? Where to begin troubleshooting?

Please help!

 

[sp12]

Using old hard drives? Biostar motherboard?

Two pretty decent issues right there.

 

[wip99gt]

Have you tried downloading all the newest drivers and reinstalling them? It's a pretty quick thing to try. Possibly one of the drivers didn't install properly. I had that happen with an asus P5Q a while back. I got the latest drivers, reinstalled xp (possibly overkill), and installed the new drivers I got online and it ran perfect. Might not fix your problem but worth a shot.

 

[poom]

Ok I am going to try reinstalling the new drivers off the ATI website. If that doesn't work I am going to try and boot the system up on XP and seeing if the system works with that OS. I still don't understand why everything is so slow though. It takes 2 mintutes to close an open window, such as task manager. Could this be an issue with voltage / timing in the BIOS? (Need to buy a non USB keyboard so I can get in there...)

Will update on the progress, any other ideas would be great - I am trying to figure out how to troubleshoot on my own I really don't know where to start.

 

[wip99gt]

I don't see it being a voltage isssue. I've always seen freezing or crashing when it was a voltage issue. It won't be a timing issue. Bad ram could be causing this problem but it seems like a driver or bios issue to me. The ATI warnings really have me thinking its a video card or motherboard driver problem.

 

[poom]

Ok, so I tried the vid card in both PCI slots.
I was running a master/slave HHD setup, I got rid of my slave to eliminate installing Windows to the wrong one.

Reformatted the HD completely again.

Took out the ram and started her up, nothing. Put the ram back in, system started. So my guess is it isn't the ram.

Right now I am reinstalling windows... but I am really thinking this might be a mobo BIOS thing. I am going to flash the bios after Windows is done.

Hopefully that'll work....will keep posting my progress.

 

[wip99gt]

If that doesn't fix it try testing the memory.
This forum is pretty good at explaining how to use memtest86:
http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38201
I don't know if a bad video card can do this but do you have a different one you can try at all?
Have you tried resetting the CMOS on the motherboard. I was reading a bit about this and some people have had this problem and it's been solved that way.