Fail to boot, every other boot

[charzoc]

Hello all,
Thanks for taking the time to read my post!

I recently made my first computer build, it almost went smoothly. It functions fine, plays well, much faster than my store-bought from 5 years ago...

It ran fine the first week, then I started having this issue. Every other boot, it fails. 100% accuracy, its literally always every other boot. There is no on-board graphics port, and I do not get a signal to my monitors from my video card. Again, half the time. The other half the time, it runs perfectly. After some research, I found that power supplies can cause issues if they aren't delivering the right power. I checked the 3 voltage lines, and they were all normal. I then assumed it may be a video card issue. I am using 2 hd radeon 6850's in crossfire, so I tried each one alone, in both pci slots, and the problem persisted every other boot. I have also reset my motherboards UEFI settings (standardly uses 1600mhz ram, but i have 1866 mhz which is supported, so that is the only change), and reformatted my main harddrive and reinstalled windows and all my drivers. After consulting with several friends who have built there own computers, none had ever heard of a boot up issue that happened so precisely on every other boot.

I would be very appreciative of any advice on locating the problem. What I have personally narrowed it down to is: motherboard, processor, or drivers/updates/software.

Again, I built this 3 weeks ago, no problems for a week, and the problem has existed for the past 2 weeks.

My build is as follows:
Monitors: 2 - 21.5" Acer S211HL LED Displays
Case: Antec 300 Black Steel ATX Mid Tower
Motherboard: ASRock 970 Extreme3
Processor: AMD FX-4170 Zambezi 4.2GHz AM3+ Quad Core
Power Supply: RAIDMAX 700W Plus Bronze Certified Modular Power Supply
Video Cards: 2 - Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1gb 256-bit GDDR5 (crossfired)
Main Hard Drive: 128gb 2.5" Crucial M4 SSD
Secondary Hard Drive: 256gb 5400rpm HDD
CD Drive: Lite-On SATA DVD-ROM model iHDS118-04
Multimedia Reader: Koutech IO-RCM621 All-in-one multi-format card reader
RAM: 4 x 4GB G.Skill Sniper Series DDR4 1866 ram
OS: 64 bit windows 7

Thanks in advance for any input!

 

[charzoc]

Thanks, I will give that a shot when I get home from work!

 

[charzoc]

just got home, flashed the bios, it was successful. However, the problem remains, still not getting a video signal every other boot, and on the correct boots there is a reminder that it failed the last boot.

 

[charzoc]

as in, reflash it in the morning? Just woke up, problem is still here.

 

[charzoc]

Reflashed it successfully again, and it has booted correctly 6 times in a row. That's all I have time for though, ill try some gaming tonight and reset it a few times then just to be sure.

But as a recap for anyone else experiencing this in a future, flash your bios! It took me two times, but it seems to be working correctly now.

Thanks for the help urban legend!

 

[charzoc]

Best answer selected by charzoc.