the new video card may throw a wrench in this, but here is the basics.
Hitting esc during boot - will bring up a boot menu. If it doesn't you are not tapping it soon enough. (F10 will bring up Setup or BIOS) (F11 will launch the recovery manager from the recovery partition)
If you installed a graphics card and it was windows 8 compatible then everything should be fine. If it was win7 compatible, then you would have disabled fast boot and enabled legacy support in bios, which is really strange if that is the case because then it is even easier to get into BIOS with the esc key or F10.
I'm assuming no one responded to you sooner because you are doing the right thing... just not fast enough ... maybe.
The best thing to do on the recover media is hit esc - bring up the boot menu and select the drive it is installed in. kind of a waste of time chaning the bios boot order imho.
but that is basically it.
good luck.