It's not a thesis it' a guess based on the OP's problems. old card works fine newer one doesn't same driver whats your guess being tht it worked live and no obvious corruption. I know when I have a stop at that that same point it was the 331 nVidia driver not liking 3.12 much..

I've had fairly good luck with AMD but only old AMD the 5770 is pretty old though.

change my mind.

Well, that's your personal opinion & experience. I myself din't have such problems having used such cards.
What I see is obvious lack of support for old models by the new catalyst. It gets me mad as well, as it's like: old amd= use radeon, new amd=use new driver.
Another thing is that I have a INTEL/ATI muxless video chipset and the support for Linux for such hardware sucks a lot for now.
I'm kinda constrained to use Ubuntu which I hate, grrr.
Anyway, let's not discuss about experience as , as usual each one of us has his owns
I wonder if the guy who made this thread, has tried to boot the video with nomodeset yet.

No I haven't tried the nomodset yet... I've been so busy with work. Will do so in about 2 hours when I get home from work.
I had wiped SuSE and installed Fedora. When that still hung at the grey screen I pulled out the old graphics card and used a different one and it was all good.

It's working just fine now with a different graphics card but I'd be interested to see how to get the old one working again as it's much more powerful. Will post my results soon.

SuSe is the slowest KDE because it packs so much compatibility into itself. Its load is 4.6GB. SuSe's rep has always been its ability to handle all types of hardware and it has a very special ability to adjust itself to the best and most optimum operation. But it is slow and likes 64 bit , 3GB dual core chips. I have found it best with AMD processors because they are what we call "milspec" (nearly A bomb proof). Yes, that is my opinion. There is plenty of advice out there for making your SuSe run better and faster and usually involves making it do less unnecessary processing. If you use proprietary Linux software, it may have conflicts, even compatibility issues, but that is rare. No OS is without its problems and usually fixable. It might be a good idea to get your computer bench tested. You never know. I did one on mine just recently and found mine was in horrible shape. I fixed all I could and now it works quite nicely. If it isn't going to happen for you, try another like Kubuntu 13.10.

Wow, finally have more time to work on this.
Long story short, I wiped and installed Windows 7.
I get to the Windows loading screen, and then it goes black.
No login screen ever appears.
I've even waited for 4 hours.

Reinstalled again using a different Windows 7 disk, and I have the same results.

Removed CMOS battery for 5 minutes.
Booted up again, but same thing, black screen.
It does say in the bottom right in white letters "windows is not genuine".
So part of Windows is actually being loaded.
The previous disk didn't say that, but still had a black screen.
After 2 hours, the computer just shut off on its own.

Updated my BIOS to the latest firmware and rebooted.
Same issue as before.

So long story short, here's what's going on.
Tried Windows 7, SuSE 13.1 and Fedora 20
Used multiple copies of Windows 7
Tried installing operating system on two different hard disks.
Hard disk scans report no errors.
Memtest reports no errors with the RAM.
Removed CMOS for 5 minutes.
Updated BIOS and confirmed it's the latest version.

No matter what operating system is installed, it stalls before the login screen indefinitely.
The only time I can get up and running is immediately after a fresh install...it will run fine for literally weeks. Until the very first reboot. Then we're back at square one. That situation applies to Linux only; Windows simply won't get that far.

Going to try using the other graphics card again tonight.
If that doesn't work, I'll try pulling all SATA drives out of my machine except the one the OS is on.
Also will try removing DVD ROM drive as well.

SuSE was one of the first linux distros I've used.
I was thinking about getting someone to look at the computer.
At work I was in the network operations dept and someone had suggested that I try dd again.
I had done it before but it was suggested to use dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1 bs=512 count=1.
Gave that a shot and reinstalled Fedora 20.
Downloaded KDE.
Rebooted. It works.
Rebooted three more times just to be sure.
So it was an MBR issue?
I suppose my knowledge of how OS's get installed to a hard drive must be limited as I thought everything would have been taken care of in that respect.
Apparently I was wrong.
So it's fixed. I had to wipe the MBR with dd.

It is possible the BIOS is still assuming that both memory sticks are present (when they aren't)... This could be causing the kernel to also assume both are present - which would cause problems when it tries to load large GUI applications (and I count the X server as large for this case).

You might try booting with "MEM=<size>" where size is the amount of memory you have.

from kernel documentation (Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt)

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