Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 hangs on boot with PCIe 3.0 card

[AntiSaneity]

Not sure what's causing this honestly. Last week I put a Gigabyte Z97X in my system and since then I've been getting intermittent boot issues if my GTX 970 is installed. If I remove the GTX 970, or put in an older 2.0 card or run off integrated, it works fine.

I know there's no issues with the GTX 970 as these problems didn't exist on the older H87-D3H board I had installed previously, and the card recently came back from an RMA for an unrelated issue where they found it was performing above expectations. I've tried flashing various versions of the BIOS for the motherboard, along with a tear down to make sure nothing was seated oddly. GPU has also had a BIOS update as a precaution. Nothing I do seems to make any difference. The issues just happens at random where it hangs on boot, no output at all, until I hit restart or power down. Even then, there's a chance it boots into Windows and the whole machine just moves at a crawl.

BIOS settings are Optimized Defaults, and nothing I've played with in there have made any difference anyway. All my drivers are up to date and I've done a full OS reinstall to cover all my bases on the software side (that I know of) and a full day of swapping hardware to test seems to show that the issue only comes up with a PCIe 3.0 card is installed.

There's no overclocking on this system right now, everything is running at stock settings.

I'm totally at a loss here, planned on calling the place I bought it tomorrow and seeing if I can exchange the motherboard unless there's something I can do that doesn't involve tearing the rig apart again.

Specs:

CPU: i7 4790k w/ Cool Master Hyper Evo 212
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 970 G1 on BIOS v.F13
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 on BIOS v.F5 (have tried F3, F4, and F6e also)
Power Supply: EVGA 600B
Storage: Samsung 840 120GB SSD
ADATA SP920SS 256GB SSD
WD Black 1TB
WD Green 500GB

 

[GhislainG]

I'd contact Gigabyte support because they should be able to duplicate the issue or confirm there's a problem with the motherboard or the GPU.

 

[nitroman]

Sorry for bumbing this thread . But I have the same issue with the same Specs ( CPU , Mobo , GPU ) .for me it stuck on first splash screen with reddish color . The only way i fix it is by removing the GPU and start the system and it will get to windows , Then Shut down and install my GPU and it will work normally . But i have to do this everyday =( . Did you fixed it ? and if yes can you tell me how please ?

 

[GhislainG]

Sorry for bumbing this thread . But I have the same issue with the same Specs ( CPU , Mobo , GPU ) .for me it stuck on first splash screen with reddish color . The only way i fix it is by removing the GPU and start the system and it will get to windows , Then Shut down and install my GPU and it will work normally . But i have to do this everyday =( . Did you fixed it ? and if yes can you tell me how please ?

What does Gigabyte support say about the issue?

 

[nitroman]

I kind fixed it hopefully , When I unplug my USB Mouse it actually works and I plug it back once i am in windows . For some reason bios freezes when it reads the mouse . It's really weird since I've been using the same system for over a year and never encountered such issue before . and I am not sure why it works when i remove my GPU and reinsert it again or why it actually works when i reset my bios and it just works for once , Until i shutdown ( Restart works fine ) and then try to power on it freezes in the first splash screen . Gigabyte is really Weird as this is the 2nd time i get a weird issue with their products ( The first beening the GTX 970 G1 does not output analog signal in the DVI-I port during boot up ) .