Windows 7 freeze at start screen after Nvidia graphics driver install

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Kyle_2

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Aug 18, 2015
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After some extensive googling, there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what the problem is. On a completely new build, everything works great until I install the drivers (I've tried the newest and several of the older drivers listed on Nvidia's website). This has happened on the new GTX 970 that I may have erroneously RMA'd, and on my old GTX 750 which worked in my old system.

Specs:
Mainboard: ASRock X99E-ITX/ac
CPU: Intel Core i7-5820k
RAM: 2x8Gb Crucial DDR4 2133 (memtest good)
PSU: EVGA supernova 650P2 650W
Graphics: Asus GTX 970 4GB (short pcb)
Storage: Seagate 2TB 7200rpm HDD (I know, I know)

I can boot it in safe mode, uninstall the graphics drivers, and it'll boot back up normally every time. My multimeter reads 12.2V on the vga leads, but the old 750 doesn't use any supplemental power. I'm not sure if that necessarily rules out a PSU issue.

I've saved video drivers until absolutely last. I've installed all Windows updates and confirmed that I have updated drivers for everything else. I don't think the problem will be solved with a 3rd party driver uninstaller because this problem happened on the very first time when no previous drivers had been installed on the system.

Does anyone have any idea why Windows appears to hate graphics drivers? Thanks in advance.
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

Titan
Mar 25, 2010
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Could be a bad card or bad power supply, maybe a bad motherboard. Video drivers not working on a clean Windows build pretty much point at a hardware issue. There is no consensus on the problem because it may be one of several things and without swapping things out to test no way to find out exactly what it is. Since this happens with 3 different cards, we can pretty much rule out the video card as the cause, but maybe the motherboard, power supply, maybe RAM (try one stick at a time), maybe CPU on the outside change. Did you check for a latest BIOS? Remember to plug in all power leads the card needs?
 
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K

Kyle_2

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Aug 18, 2015
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Interestingly enough, I removed a RAM and it works great. I tried both sticks in both slots to verify that one of them is bad.

Just out of curiosity, why would a RAM problem only manifest as a crashing video driver? Was it just not being fully utilized until it tried to distribute instructions to the GPU? Is that how drivers work?

Thanks for the reply.
 
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