CD Drive spins for a minute before boot?

[ighardcore]

My roommate is having some killer PC problems.. He's running my old Q6600 with a new 5870 he bought. Ever since we installed the 5870, the CD drive spins for about a minute to two minutes before BIOS comes up, aside from the annoying part, it doesn't seem to have any problem reading disks or accessing them in a timely fashion once booting is complete. In addition to this, his system is extremely unstable, but I can't seem to replicate the issues by running FurMark or IntelBurnTest. Sometimes when playing games or almost every time when bringing the computer back from sleep mode, the system will crash with a BSOD.

The system is running a (~2.5-3 year old) 500W PSU, a Q6600 at 3.2GHz (IBT stable), stock XFX 5870 (no problems running FurMark stress test). The only thing I haven't really had a chance to test yet is the memory, and the CD drive spinning issue during boot really boggles me. Going to try to get a memory test in tonight while he's at work, other than that, any ideas what could be causing these problems?