Fx 5900 Zt

Question

Well, I got a new Geforce 5900 ZT (asked for an XT but that's another story!!)  
After putting the card in the system, and booting up, all is well.  BUT, as soon as I put the proper Geforce Drivers on from the MSI Installation disk I reboot as instructed.  This is where it all goes wrong - I get as far as windows blue bar going across the screen then the display goes into standby, the computer has booted up all the way to my log in I am sure - but I can't see any of that of course because the screen is dead.
Putting back the old Geforce 2 Ti works just fine again.  
One thing, this computer does the same thing with an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro too, exactly the same thing??  The only difference between the two 'mdern' cards is that they are more power hungry and the old one is a baby.  
I reckon (I may be wrong) but I reckon my pissy 300 Watt PSU may be doing this What do you guys think?

Answer 1

You may be on to something as far as an incompatability issue, however, the only way to test that theory is to have lots of hardware to test with that a system builder or tech would. Unfortunately the enthusiast runs the risk of not being able to properly troubleshoot an issue.
I suggest trying the card in a different PC to see if the problem can be duplicated, for starters.
There also is a possibility that there could be a serious driver conflict.
What I often have to do is Disable System Restore, remove the current driver via the add remove applet in the control panel. Then use http://www.drivercleaner.net to clean the drivers, shutdown, remove power from the PC, remove the old card, install the new card, and restart, ignore the found new hardware wizard, go to the folder where I downloaded  nVidia Drivers and run the installation.
I often have to do this, and it works like a charm 99% of the time. Other times, I sometimes have to reload the OS.
Just yesterday I had a clients PC in, and reloaded the OS from 98SE to XP Pro, I had the exact same blank screen issue, and it turned out that the drivers in SP2 and on MS Windows Update caused the problem. This was an old HP pavilion with a TNT2 Riva card, I could have left the XP drivers in, but I was getting strange behavior, I checked to see what version the drivers were and they were of the 57XX series (clouded memory?) That is simply too advanced of a driver for that card, even if Microsoft deems it as ok, they don't, and can't know every configuration out there. I generally avoid using Wupdate for drivers, as I have been bitten many times, I still harbored the thought that they may have gotten it right, boy was I wrong...how's that for the definition of insanity!
Now, I know from experience that the 45XX drivers work without issue in the same hardware config with many workstations I administer, So I did the same method and it worked. This is just a basic example...
Some highlights are that the latest drivers are not always the best for even a previous generation card. the latest drivers are focused on the current generation's chipset capabilities and often cause problems for older generation cards. It is best to stick to the driver that was made for that genre of card.
3XXX>GF3
4XXX>GF4
5XXX>GF5 (FX)
6XXX>GF6 U get the idea
In some cases a a game developer mandates a specific driver such as Far Cry's minimum driver recommendation was 53.03, last I checked. That is the only time I consider stepping out to try anything new, unless I see something on a review or a forum somewhere that might influence me to try the latest.
The drivers CD that accompanies the hardware is better left in the box, I prefer to go to the source (in this case nVidia)
Go here for  nVidia Drivers
Go here to find previous versions that may work better with your card http://ftp://download1.nvidia.com/windows/
Also, you never mentioned the make/model/manufacturer of the PSU.
550 watt's tells me nothing. Hope it's not a Q-Tec