Installing a new graphics card, what are my first steps?

[redvandam]

Hello,

I am upgrading my 8800GT to a GTX 550 Ti today but I've already hit a bit of a snag.

My first thought was to remove the GPU and display drivers so I could do a clean install of the new GPU drivers.

I uninstalled the nVidia display drivers and restarted my computer. My plan was then to uninstall the 8800GT driver but my computer couldn't restart. I had to restore a system save that still had the nVidia drivers installed.

Was my mistake restarting the computer before uninstalling the 8800GT driver? Should I not turn my computer back on until a have the card installed?

I was fairly certain I could run my computer with no display drivers installed, it'd just look bad.

 

[JDFan]

What MOBO do you have and are you just removing the Nvidia Graphics driver or all Nvidia drivers ?? If you have an Nvidia chipset based MOBO and are removing all Nvidia drivers that might be the reason for it not booting after uninstalling them. You want to just remove the graphics driver.
What you want to do is first go to the Nvidia site and download the newest drivers for the new card - remove the Nvidia Graphics drivers (this will switch the OS to use the generic VGA driver) - shut down and install the new video card and connect the monitor to it - reboot and let the system detect the new card and install the driver for it using the ones you downloaded.

 

[COLGeek]

Assuming your power supply meets the needs of the 550 Ti, are you saying the system will not restart with it (the new GPU) physically installed (with the 6 or 6/8 pin PCI-E connectors attached)?

 

[redvandam]

I have a Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard and a 650W PSU.

So just to clarify, I have a 8800GT driver in the device manager and 3 nVidia drivers in the programs list (3D vision driver, graphics driver and Physx).

Last time I uninstalled all of the nVidia drivers and had the error starting up where I had to restore so they were all back.

Are you saying to uninstalled the 8800GT driver first, then the NVidia drivers, install the new card and boot the computer up?

I already have the most recent nVidia drivers, right now it;s just cleaning out the old ones.

 

[clarkjd]

If you are going from one nVidia card to another nVidia card, you shouldn't have to change your video drivers.

 

[COLGeek]

If you are going from one nVidia card to another nVidia card, you shouldn't have to change your video drivers.

This is technically correct. You shouldn't have to do anything with the previous drivers. You should be able to install the new video card and then simply update the drivers afterward.