I just got a new system as a wedding present and am having trouble getting the graphics card to work. I am fairly certain the card is working fine as we tested it in another system that uses XP and it works.

Until my card came, my friend was loaning me a 8800 which worked fine. Once mine came in I have had problems.

I have an MSI 9800 GT and am running Vista x64 Home Premium.

Only the standard vga driver seems to be stable.
I have installed every NVIDIA forceware version that lists the 9800 GT and none of them work. After installing any of them but the newest beta driver package the system shows the little windows loading bar then has a black screen. With the newest beta drivers windows will come up, but has frequent freezes. When I say freeze I mean the fan and power continue as normal, but the screen stops frozen in a frame and the mouse and keyboard do not respond.

It freezes every time I try to run a 3d game, run dxdiag, or any 3d system test program. It also freezes frequently in Internet explorer, but not Chrome. Often it freezes at a screensaver as well.

I don't think this is a power issue because I have a 700 W power supply which ran the 8800 just fine, and I would think I could get the other drivers to boot windows at least if it was a power issue.

Any thoughts?

Hi jwwylie,

Apparently a lot of people are having problems and there does not seem to be any easy fix.
Some things that I have heard to work are;

1, Changing to an earlier driver.
2, swapping the outputs from the graphic card this will maybe mean using a DVI adapter or changing cable
3, (I love this one) Buying a new flatscreen with DVI connecter.
4, On boot up pressing the f8 key and allowing the computer to boot in a low graphics mode, after the computer has booted use the nvidia display panel to select a working resolution.
5, This is normally used with option 4 disable all nvidia apps that start on startup

It seems that no one option works with everyone. so I wish you luck

Pooch

Hmmmm, Acer 22" Widescreen huh, is it the Acer AL2216W by any chance? if so... take a look in here, this may help you out

8800 GTS Driver Problems

Interesting, I hadn't considered a monitor problem. I'm not sure what my monitor model is but I will check in to that when I get home. Thanks for the helpful information.

My card has only DVI out, but the monitor has both DVI and VGA in (if I recall). Are you suggesting that doing a DVI to VGA cable might help?

Originally Posted by jwwylie

Interesting, I hadn't considered a monitor problem. I'm not sure what my monitor model is but I will check in to that when I get home. Thanks for the helpful information.

My card has only DVI out, but the monitor has both DVI and VGA in (if I recall). Are you suggesting that doing a DVI to VGA cable might help?

No, apparantly DVI on the monitor is good, this is only if you have more than one out on the card. It would seem that sometimes only one is working and then normally when you have a choice between DVI and VGA.

But that said feel free to try it as it cannot hurt.

My card does have two DVI outs, I'll try switching it when I get home. Though i would think I would never get a signal to the monitor if that were the problem.

No, I would tend to agree with you, dont forget these are a whole range of possible answers for a whole range of PC's

Can you check the temperatures of the card? Try GPU-Z or if some software came with your graphics card, use this.

alright, last night and tonight I tried reseating the card, switching the dvi connectors, and installing the new beta drivers which nvidia released today. All have no effect on my problem.

Like the previous 180 drivers, this one will boot to windows, but as soon as I run dxdiag, 3d mark 3d test, the nvidia control panel, or any game the system freezes.

I installed GPU-Z and the two GPU temperatures listed are 43 C and 38 C

Try having a look here
NO SIGNAL, BLANK SCREEN VISTA - NVIDIA Forums

I hope this helps, please let me know how you get on

Pooch