MSI K7 and Video Quirk

[rkoenn]

I build systems and did two systems over the past week with this quirk. Both used an MSI K7N2-L NVidia based Athlon XP MB. On one I installed a Sapphire Radeon 9500 Pro card and in the other a Sapphire Radeon 7000 card. In both systems, I had the same quirk. On about 30% of the boots during the BIOS checks, the video does not initialize and even though the system boots, there is no video to the monitor. You can perform a keyboard shutdown as well. Also, if you hit the hardware reset when you notice the video problem during the BIOS checks, it will usually resolve the problem. Once you are running, no problems in both machines. I wrote MSI for any suggestions they might have. Finally, on one system I installed an ATI Radeon 9000 card and the problem is not present then. Must be something between the MSI MB and the Sapphire Radeon cards. Some quirky problem with BIOS video initialization. If anyone has any suggestions I would greatly like to hear them. It is rather difficult to sell someone a new system with this kind of a problem. Thanks in advance.