PSU is Corsair HX520W at breadboard stage, now it's Cooler Master Silent Pro M600 in the case.
Ram is G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin
DDR3 SDRAM DDR3
1600 (PC3 12800) F3-12800CL9Q-16GBXM new kit, first
use.
CPU is i5 2320 Quad Core
BIOS is 3304.
At the breadboard stage:
I have two pcie vid
cards, both working at last pull, gt 440 and 9500 gt, tried both.
When the card is installed to the first
pciex16, I can get a boot with
video on the first try after inserting,
typically. After that, boot
goes to no video but I can hear the memtest
floppy grinding away, q-code
leds show A0, "IDE Initialization is
started". The VGA_LED is lit,
indicating that error condition but no
other problem indications.
If I put the card in PCIEx16_2, it will
repeatedly boot with video. In
BIOS>Advanced>System Agent
Configuration>Graphics Configuration, there
is "Initiate iGPU [Enabled]"
by default. The help says, "to empower
both integrated and discrete
graphics." Now, I'm pretty sure I've read
in Asus marketing and/or
reviews that this might be a benefit for
encoding, which is something I
do, sharing processing across both GPUs.
However, if I disable this,
boot to video seems stable with the card
in PCIEx16_1...
I ran memtest86+ v4.20 overnight, 3.5 passes, no errors.
I installed this mobo to my previous build, replacing a P5Q Deluxe, using the working card, gtx 470. It works, after a fashion. I can boot and run the OS, everything looking fine, on a one cold boot basis. There has been one reboot from a BIOS change that went on to video initialized, POST, and boot. Every other attempt to reboot from a running system fails to initialize the video card. While working on the desk, I found that turning off power and waiting for a short while, but not too short, would give me one good boot. After that, any reboot gave a failed video. The POST success beep sounds, now that I have it hooked up to the case speaker but I'm not going to let it boot into OS as I don't want to get a corrupt filesystem, not being able to see the clean shutdown options and nothing in the OS is going to bring video back when BIOS won't initialize it. I can also hear the one long and three short beep code, which is for video fail.
I'd say this is consistent across the three cards I have that are pcie: the two I've already specified and the working pull from the older mobo, gtx 470. One further problem is that I am interested in the iGPU capabilities for assisting in processes such as encoding, as I mentioned. So, I just tried enabling that in BIOS, again, and I can't boot. Video won't initialize, I've powered off and reset CMOS multiple times but video stays off, POST success beep sounds. I'm working from a different computer, ATM.
)
that process has come to a grinding halt, small novella available here 
