Trouble load drivers for Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT Silent Pipe

I'm new to this forum and somewhat of a computer novice though I've build about 10 machines of the past several years. Been promising myself I was going to do some gaming but 10 years got away quick, so I finally ordered all the parts for a modest gaming system (see list below). The guts of it include Epox MF-570SLI mobo, Athlon 64 x2 4200+ processor, Gigabyte GeForce 7600GT 'Silent Pipe II' graphics card, Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 (512 mb x 2) and Win XP w/ SP2.

Built the system and it posted just fine. Loaded Win XP and downloaded all patches from Microsoft Update without problems. Went to add DirectX 9c but it must have already been present as none of the 57+ mb of it downloaded, with the screen then saying DirectX 9 had loaded correctly.

Problem is, upon trying to load the drivers for the graphics card, about halfway through the process I suddenly lost video completely ie the monitor screen just went black and the indicator light starts blinking indicating it's not getting a video signal.

To shorten an already long story, I've loaded Win XP 3 times trying different things. I downloaded and tried to load the latest driver from Gigabyte and have read the Epox Mobo book. Graphics card was plugged into CPI-express x 16 and I made sure the BIOS was not set to SLI mode. I made sure the card had good airflow flowing over it for cooling as it is passive cooling. I don't have another graphics card to test with. NOTHING HAS HELPED!

Am I doing something wrong? Could it be a compatability issue between the mobo and graphics card? Is the card bad? I would try to flash a later BIOS for the mobo but Epox's website does not have a later version. I'm sure the graphics card is DirectX 9 compabible. Been struggling with this for about 4 days now.

Anyway, I got the card from NewEgg (they're great BTW); called them yesterday and they immediately issued a RMA so I'm mailing the card back today. I'm going to try an ATI card instead as I don't want to risk that this is some weird compatability issue between this board and nVidia.

I'd still love to find out what caused this just for future reference. This is the thing I love (and hate!) about computers--each times I build one I learn something new. Thanks in advance and God bless.

Rest of main computer parts:

WD Raptor 74 gb
Enermax 420W PSU
Lite-On DVD burner with lightscribe