Would the system boot normally without the card (empty slot and CPU on-die video)?
Yes - need to diagnose the card.
No - Motherboard issue
Yes the system boots up regardless of whether the card is in the slot or not.
But if the GPU doensnt power up on boot I can switch the HDMI into the onboard connecter and I immediately get display signal.
the RAM, CPU, GPU, BOOT lights on the motherboard dont give me an error either. Even when the GPU doesnt boot, I assume this is because its using the internal GPU from the CPU?
SOOOO I tried to disable the onboard GPU again, it gives me 4 quick beeps and the GPU light turns on (going by the internet it could be a bunch of things, not just what the manual says apparently).
I also tried to switch the GPU to the x8 PCIe slot and it doesnt boot/no fan on startup. I can tell its working when I press the power button and the fan immediately starts spinning vs just jumping a bit but not fully spinning.
Back in the day we had 15pin dsub vga. It was technically 15 pin, but realistically it was 14 actual pins and the cable hooked to a monitor was missing the #9 pin.
That #9 pin carries a 5v signal that was detrimental to monitors, however, you needed a slightly different cable with the full 15 pins in order to hook to a TV because the TV used that 5v signal for handshake purposes and to send resolution information back to the gpu. If using the 14pin cable, you got no signal because the gpu had no idea what resolution to render at as the TV couldn't supply it.
So it'd be my guess that there's either a cable issue with the TV, or maybe ARC isn't on or a different setting is not allowing the handshake that hdmi-dp requires and is showing up as a dead short where there shouldn't be one which is read by the gpu and it refuses to power up.
So I've gone through a few troubleshooting steps, and I've tried it with a regular monitor and still doesnt work. Also whether the HDMI or a DP is connected or not I still get the same issues with the card booting up whenever it decides to....sometimes after its been disconnected for a bit I can plug it back in and it will work. It then will work for a boot or two then just go back to completely not working. When i does boot it functions perfectly (including running benchmarks/gaming)