Black Screen while Installing Display Drivers (Nvidia)

[exxentric_muffin]

I recently bought a reasonably priced graphics card of off ebay. After my old Graphics Card died just two months ago, I decided that a new, simmilarly speced card would be too expensive for me at the moment. So I went onto ebay and found a GTX 980 ti for around 200€, so I bought it. Sadly enough, the GPU doesn't work as expected.

 

Now to the description of my problem:

My PC boots into Windows (I also tried Linux, which also worked). In Windows device manager the graphics card isn't recognized and it just says "Windows Basic Display Adaptor". In CPU-Z it shows nothing at all. So I downloaded the official drivers on the Nvidia page, the latest ones, installed them and while it was installing, my screen turned black. So I left it alone for a while, but when I returned nothing had changed, so I did a hard reset and the PC booted and I was relieved, but as soon as the Windows Logo showed, the screen turned black again with no response. I expected a Software issue and tried the following things:

• I booted into safe mode, uninstalled the drivers using DDU and tried to install the same drivers with the same results.

• Then I tried the same thing, but installing older drivers with the same result.

• Then I tried two other drivers with the exact same result.

• Then I took the graphics card apart, cleaned it, looked for visible damage, applied new thermal compound and tried the things described above in multiple variations.

• So after being very frustated I left the graphics card sitting on my shelf for about a week.

• Then I reset the bios on my PC, which didn't change anything.

• So I changed to another PC and tried steps 1 to 5 on a clean installation of Windows. That changed nothing either.

• Then I tried to get it to work on Linux with my main machine, which worked better than Windows (surprisingly even games like minecraft and skyrim worked fluidly) until I installed the Nvidia drivers and everything went downhill (black screen).

• So I tried the other PC again and installed a different GPU Bios and tried steps 1 to 4 and was even more frustrated seeing it not work.

• What about another Bios? Nope!

• Maybe this one will change things? NO!!!

Now I'm at the end of my resources and I thought I'd come on here for some inspiration or tips or something.

 

Specs of my "Main Machine":

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X

MSI Gaming Plus X570 Motherboard

obviously no graphics card

and two sticks of Crucial 8 GB 3600Mhz that run in dual channel mode

 

Specs of "the other" PC:

Some very old Intel Xeon CPU

ASUS Z9PE-016 Motherboard

and two sticks of some DDR3 Ram with each 16 GB

 

 

The make of the graphics card is a Gainward GTX 980 ti.

 

Thanks in advance for possible replies and inspiration. Have a good day.