Experiencing very weird boot problems on my x51, please help

I already posted about this on Alienware Arena but I think no one had an answer so I'll repost my older posts here to give you the situation.

1st post:

dee_el said:

I've had my new GTX 960 card for a week and it's worked fine without any noticeable throttling, artifacts or any sort of issue that I can see. In fact, just last night I was playing a game just fine, and I shut off the computer and left it off overnight. I woke up today and found that my computer wouldn't boot properly; it just gives me the fans and the lights, then shuts off, then the fans and lights come to life again, then shut off again. It did this in sort of a loop, so I attempted to stop it by holding the power button for a couple seconds, and then it finally gave me the beep and I got to the login screen. So I shut it off from the login screen, and then turned it on again and away it went again with the previously mentioned behavior. Once I got the beep again I got no video from my discrete card. I had to plug the HDMI cable into my integrated output to get a picture.

I shut it off it again, came back at least an hour later, and tried again. This time it gave me fans/lights, shut off once, then actually turned on again with the beep and a video signal from my discrete. I went to Geforce Experience, saw my card still was recognized, so now here I am wondering what actually happened, because now it works, and so it seems like reseating the card isn't necessary, so I'm worried now. It'll probably give me the same weird behavior the next time I turn on the PC. Dell Support didn't seem to say anything about this. Any ideas of what happened, and is there any solution to this problem?

2nd post:

dee_el said:

FrankK 65 said:

That's weird, I wish I had something to tell you. Some one on this site might have an answer for you.

I hope so. Thanks for the bump btw

Also I want to make it clear that my card should be no problem for the x51; it's an MSI GTX 960, a reference design card that other people have put into their rig with great results. My results were great too, until this bizarre stuff started happening. So a little update: yesterday I turned on the computer and it booted normally, using the discrete. Today, though, I dealt with pretty much the same thing that my original post describes. Now I'm as puzzled as ever, and my card still works, I've got a video signal from it and I'm even watching the QuakeCon stream on Twitch with no problems. So it works fine one day, then does the same weird stuff again the next day (today) for whatever reason. It's almost as if it's some random thing, like the computer does what it wants upon boot. I don't know. To get it to work today, I had to go into BIOS and make sure the display was set to discrete, which it actually was when I went in, and then save changes and reboot. If anyone knows a solution, please post.

That's what it started with, but now it's worse. Today I had to do the same BIOS trick but  it didn't work. Then I tried it again but then after boot I got nothing from both the discrete AND the integrated. Fans + lights + no video. So then I just shut it off by holding the power button, and I unplugged my power supply from the power strip, and did other things for half an hour. I came back, plugged in the power supply, and the computer turned on without me pressing the button, which I didn't expect. Still no picture from discrete and integrated, and I did wait five minutes before plugging in the HDMI cable into both ports.

So I browsed for solutions on my phone (surprise, there were none) while I left the computer on with the HDMI plugged into the onboard port, and then after maybe five minutes the computer made a short beep, while the fans and lights were on the whole time. They didn't turn off before or after the beep happened in this particular case. Of course I had no idea what was actually happening, or why it did the beep, because no video signal was available. So then after the beep I actually got video from the integrated, which is what I'm using now.

I really have no idea what to do. I can't keep doing this everyday when I want to use my computer. I can't find a solution for this anywhere and I need help. Please, does anyone know what's up and what I can do?

TL;DR Computer does not use discrete graphics upon boot -- must restart and go into BIOS -- BIOS displays discrete as the selected display device anyway when I go to that option -- must save changes and shut down and reboot computer -- however this method stopped working today. -- Video card works fine in games so I believe this is some other issue.