Gigabyte board might be failing - how to tell?

[aserothbw]

I have a MA790GPT-UD3H gigabyte motherboard. Around february, I had to replace my old video card with a radeon HD 6850. Lately, I have been hacing issues with the video suddenly dying when I am gaming. Normally, I would attribute this to the video card, but On boots, it is taking upto 15 seconds to get to the post screen, and a random amount of time to detect both my hdds. At this point, I am starting to suspect that the motherboard might be on the way out, but is there any way I can test the board to see if it is indeed starting to die? Would be nice if I didn't have to replace the board, but at this point, i'll settle for resolution to this problem one way or another. Any input would be greatly appreciated.


Additional information:

windows 7 pro 64-bit
Athlon II X4640 processor 3.00ghz
8 gigs kingston hyper ram (4 sticks)

 

[rolli59]

Start by reseating your ram and graphics card and see if the symptoms change! Running memtest on the ram is as well a good idea http://www.memtest86.com/download.html
And as always make sure that you components are clean, free of dust and lint.

 

[aserothbw]

I've run a memtest on the ram and had no issues. Unfortunately, because of my heatsink, I cannot easily reseat the ram. I also reseated the video card, and nothing seems to have made a difference so far. The only other thing I have noticed lately is random errors in the system logs trying to access the cdrom.

 

[rolli59]

Reseating the cables to the drives is another thing to try but it is possible that a drive or a controller on the board is failing.

 

[aserothbw]

Are there any utilities or programs i could run to try and stress test the motherboard, or at least asess the general health of the board?