Ok, my friend's new comp arrived in the post today and we put it together but it has a strange problem. Whenever we push the power button the comp powers up and all the lights and fans start working and it displays stuff on the screen, but it only displays gibbirish random color shit.

Specs are:

Athlon 64 3200+
Asus K8V SE Deluxe
2x512MB Kingston Value RAM PC3200
Sapphire 9800 Pro 128MB
Coolmax 450W PSU
2 80GB hitachi hard drives
NEC DVD-RW
Sony Floppy

Please help if you can. He's a bit disappointed because it's not working as he wanted.

does the machine have an operating system, or is it just full of blank disks? have you checked that the video card is seated properly? sometimes boxes in transit have problems when they reach their destination. is the monitor new as well? do you have any post code errors? we'll need a little more info.

it's just full of blank disks right now. We've hooked it up to two monitors, both of which have been used before. There might be post code errors but the screen is to garbled to read. The video card seems to be seated properly and locked into the AGP slot and the fan on the graphics card moves.

Been a while since I worked on a bug like this, but what usually works is remove all parts that are not required to get light to the screen.
Unplug the HD's and floppy. You need ram, and a video card + monitor. Don't need a keyboard or mouse. If it will put light on the monitor, you should see a post error. You can start plugging things in. You may need to re-seat the CPU and the ram. Be careful not to touch any conductive surfaces with your fingers, static can blow them.

also listen for the POST beep codes, these can be life savers. another nice tool is a POST card. these are usally small PCI cards that you insert into the computer with nothing else installed. they give a number for each, if any issue they find. they also have connectors for testing PCI voltage and power. depends on what kind you get, as to what features you may get. i really need a new one, the last one i got was for pentium/486/386 systems

This is a problem that i believe could range from the simplest thing to the most abnormal.
Try doing this first:

Let your components breathe. As soon as you get the parts out of that shrink wrap and fire them up, theyll not want to cooperate. Let the components sit out for 24 hours, this might have no affect whatsoever, but its always a good technique.

thanks for ur help guys but we sorted it out. My first instinct was that it was a problem with the video card because everything seemed to be working fine except for the garbled display. Sure enough I was right. We swung by my house and picked up an old gf4 mx440 and now the system works fine. Sure he won't be able to play any games while his grakka get's RMA'd but at least he can use his awesome comp now.