Drivers crash the display?

[tk421]

Hey everyone!  My roommate and I have been trying to diagnose his computer for some time.  We have not been able to find any solution to his problem anywhere.  I'm posting his original post from another forum on here to see if any of you could help.  We're both pretty tech savvy but this is baffling us.  An help would be appreciated.

 

Roommate's post:

 

 

Current specs:

Mobo: Asus M5A97 R2.0
CPU: AMD FX-8320 8 core Black Edition 3.5 GHz (not overclocked)
Video Card: EVGA Nvidia GeForce GTX 660
PSU: Corsair 700 watt 80+ bronze
RAM: 8gb (not sure of the speed)
OS: Windows 7
HD: 500gb, 7200 RPM hard disk drive


I left my computer one day to go to work, and when I got home I found a blank screen. Not what was going on because it wouldn't wake up, I restarted it, and it got to the windows loading screen. It was weird because instead of the glowy orbs that spin around and combine to make the windows logo, it was a generic loading bar at the bottom with green bars going across like it was loading something else. But after the loading screen, my monitor said "no signal" and went into low power mode, shutting off the screen. yet windows was still active because it made the loading jingle, and the sounds responded when I'd click on random things despite no screen.

I deduced it was the video card (at this point it was a GTX 560, mind you, not the 660 mentioned above), and put it on my buddy's test bench and we found a bum fan. Must've keeled out and overheated the GPU. With EVGA's awesome warranty, I requested an RMA, got it approved, and got the 660 today in its place. Popped it in, everything started up great, downloaded the drivers, rebooted the computer.... same dang thing. We rebooted it in safe mode, and found it ran fine. So with the free version of Driver Fusion from Treexy, we removed the old driver, restarted it, and it booted fine in normal mode. 

At this point, I'm 95% certain it's the drivers, but even when we downloaded an older version of the vid card's drivers, we still get the same problem with it going blank after the loading screen. We also tried reinstalling the mobo's chipset drivers and reinstalling the Nvidia drivers afterwards, to no avail. Yet with no Nvidia drivers it boots fine into windows, just with poor resolution.

And it still bothers me that it's not the standard glowy orbs loading screen that Windows 7 has, it's the generic green bar this whole time, drivers and whatever. I'm not sure where the conflict lies. Any additional insight or assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[AlwaysFSX]

I'm going to hazard a guess that the PCIe slot is having problems?

[Markmjb]

I'm going to hazard a guess that the PCIe slot is having problems?

Yeah, good call

@tk421 Did you try to put the graphics card in another PCIe slot?

[Geekazoid]

@tk421, I sure hope that you don't have to end up doing a complete reinstall of Windows because that'd suck as it can take quite awhile to get everything back the way it was. But it's sounding as though a reinstall of a Windows may be needed, however before you even consider this may I suggest you try a system restore because sometimes it can be some little bugger of a program that has been sneakingly installed on the PC that you may not know about or some other driver could be conflicted with your GPU driver, so try a system restore point and then report back. A system restore point unfortunately doesn't fix everything but it's worth a shot. Good luck!

[tk421]

I'm going to hazard a guess that the PCIe slot is having problems?

 

 

Yeah, good call

@tk421 Did you try to put the graphics card in another PCIe slot?

 

 

Yes, we tried alternate slots and we even RMA'd the board to ASUS and they couldn't find the problem.

 

@tk421, I sure hope that you don't have to end up doing a complete reinstall of Windows because that'd suck as it can take quite awhile to get everything back the way it was. But it's sounding as though a reinstall of a Windows may be needed, however before you even consider this may I suggest you try a system restore because sometimes it can be some little bugger of a program that has been sneakingly installed on the PC that you may not know about or some other driver could be conflicted with your GPU driver, so try a system restore point and then report back. A system restore point unfortunately doesn't fix everything but it's worth a shot. Good luck!

 

We actually reinstalled Windows when this issues first started to happen.            

[Geekazoid]

We actually reinstalled Windows when this issues first started to happen.

Heck, well I don't know what to tell ya. Except scrap the whole computer and start over (joking ).

[tk421]

Heck, well I don't know what to tell ya. Except scrap the whole computer and start over (joking ).

 

Haha, we're nearly at that point already.

 

The crazy tying is that when we wipe the system of drivers, we can boot into the BIOS just fine but we can only see part of the UEFI as it runs off the screen to the right and bottom.  We can boot up normally without the drivers but as soon as we install the nvidia display drivers, the system wont boot/display (we can still boot using safe mode).  We've tried rolling back to older drivers on both the GPU and mobo and we always get the same result.

 

 

UPDATE:  Turns out that if we ditch the DVI cable amd use a VGA cable with a DVI adapter, it works!  I have no idea why this works but we're relieved that it does.