640x480 4 bit color after new driver BSOD's, drivers dont recognize card, is it dead?

Yes I already tried lots of drivers, the older ones (and the one that I used when the BSOD occured) did not allow me to install them, they say that they are incompatible with my system, the newer ones are capable of installing, but then after restart they say that I am not using an Nvidia GPU and prevent me from acessing the control panel and after that the Display Properties in control panel got screwed and various options disappeared, altough software like Aida and Everest identifies the card properly.

I will attemp to install Windows 7 and Lubuntu to see the results but I am sure that It wont work, the same problem happened in my rescue bootable OS CD, but I dont believe the card is dead, because I do not see any artifacts.

I forgot to mention that before the formatting I cleared the BIOS CMOS with a jumper and changed the SATA conectors of my HDD´s because at first windows did not let me format the HDD it said that the disk was damaged, but after doing that, it worked.

It was the card after all, a friend gave me a Geforce 2 MX and the colors were allright, altough I was unable to get the card running properly (Code 10 Device could not start in device manager, and that it was not configured properly, and then again I was unable to install any nvidia driver, it kept saying that I did not have any Nvidia GPU even with the recommended drivers), with the PCI virge videocard I had no problem..., then I inserted the 6800 back and strangely did not work anymore (POST gave 1 long 2 short beeps (video error)) and no monitor signal.

Strange that the card died just by a driver downgrade, I played heavy games like Skyrim for hours without any trouble and below 60º due to the huge high quality cooler on the card. I will still try to fiddle with it and maybe bake it in the oven, this card is very rare and valuable.

Now im done with Nvidia silly drivers, and go for the ATI HD 2600 XT which actually is LOTS SLOWER than the 6800 Ultra Extreme which is the 2nd fastest AGP card available, only the HD 3670/4670 can beat it. Even if I hate the catalyst control panel for not letting change certain quality options and incompatibility with older games.

In regards to an update, it is not going to happen anytime soon.
I have a laptop i3 with HD 5450 and believe it or not it is slower than my desktop in most games (Desktop is a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz OC to 3.6 Ghz !! single core with Hyper Threading, 2 GB HQ memory modules with aggressive timings and 4 SATA HDD´s in RAID 0, all components have quality copper IHS/heatsinks and many case fans.

I dont call an upgrade when:

-New mobos dont have PCI slots, would be unable to use my X-Fi soundcard + front panel, and had to stick to crap Realtek stuff that everyone uses to bleed their ears for sound or phased out Asus Xonar lacking any form of decent 3D sound positioning techs, not to mention that Windows 7 and beyond prevents audio processing in hardware, it is sad that game devs dont give a shit about audio and just use crappy Xaudio and FMOD, when techs like EAX and A3D in 1998 were quite superior, event tough I dont like creative for monopolizing it, now we are left with nothing.
Even ISA cards from 1995 could play a damn CD without loosing quality by resampling like nowadays so called " HD audio" codecs.

- Any graphics card below 70$ is completely useless for gaming and unable to beat high end 10 year old technology like the 6800 Ultra that is faster than toy cards like GT 520 and HD 6450, nowadays cards are just garbage with a bunch of checkbox features like DirectX 10 while unable to actually get 30 fps within any DX10 title.

- Have to pay at least 200 bucks to get Hyper Threaded processors, something that has been available in 10 year old CPU's and something that I already can use. Not to mention than any i3 or A4 processor costs more than 120 and can be beaten by core quads and even core 2 duos.

-Have to pay extra for Unlocked versions of CPU´s for overclocking, this one costed 140$ at the time, and could be overclocked to speeds that costed 500$ and more, OC´s between 25 and 40% are non existent nowadays.

-No PS/2 ports for keyboards, PS2 keyboards allow much faster repeat rates, low latency, and simultaneous key presses than USB and dont consume CPU cycles for USB polling.

-No onboard NIC´s that support TCP segmentation or checksum hardware offloading, PCIe ones are hard to find. Good luck using heavy apps while transferring large amounts of data from your FTP in gigabit ethernets.

Every good outdated hardware gets immediately phased out so that you always have to stay in the same price ranges even if the newer hardware is actually slower, you have to pay more because its "new tech" and has more checkbox features. I am not even talking about re-branding and smaller manufacturing processes, specially in the graphics card market it is a complete circus.

And many more which I dont wish to waste my time talking about, the list would be too long and this is an already boring wall of text, I just had to relief it because it really pisses me off and I cant get a clearly superior upgrade to my current system without huge drawbacks for an acceptable price.