Total War Shogun 2 : stuck on Splash screen

Question

This problem has been bugging me for the best part of half a year now, resulting in me not being able to play one of my favourite games. It all happened around the time I got the DLC for Fall Of The Samurai.

Problem

• Click on icon to launch Total War Shogun 2 in Steam
• Game asks to start in Direct X mode (Dx9 or Dx10 is enabled)
• Select either one and the game loads to the Loading / Legal screen.
• Wait for 10 minutes and the game is still on that screen.
• Ctrl+Alt+Del to desktop and see that "Shogun 2 is not responding" in task manager.

Computer Specs (DxDiag)

http://pastebin.com/fi77nTaf

Things I have tried

• Updated Sound and Graphics drivers
• Updated BIOS for motherboard to latest version (1.2)
• Reinstalled Shogun 2 on steam
• Verified Game integrity on steam
• Changed graphics cards
• Searched Registry for "Incredibar" malware , not found on system
• Disabled SLI on Nvidia control panel

All of these have not solved my problem.

I am really running out of ideas what to do here. It makes no sense why this does not work.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

This turned out to be a problem with my motherboard's northbound chip set between the CPU and Memory.

A replacement of it along with a newer AMD Quad Core processor resolved my issue. I have used the same Memory and GPU.