Help: System running incredibly slowly after installing 8400 GS

[animalbrain]

Hi, I've got an oldish system I was trying to give a little new life as a very basic media PC, so installed a vid card I thought would do the trick. However, immediately after installing the drivers (latest from nvidia site as well as tried cd drivers), windows is slow to the point of being unusable. Previously had just been using onboard video with at least acceptable smooth playing of 720p res videos. I thought this could be an issue of using a pci-e 2.0 card in a pci-e x16 slot? Read in several places that wouldn't be an issue which is why I went ahead and tried it out. Any help is greatly appreciated.

using this mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135060

installed this vid card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130607

 

[rolli59]

You delete the drivers properly for the onboard?

 

[animalbrain]

Yep I did. Also tried uninstalling the geforce video drivers and windows returned to normal speed again albeit with worthless video. Then tried a fresh install of geforce drivers and same problem returned. Is it possible it's a lack of memory issue? System only has 515 MB ram... would the nvidia drivers require large amounts of memory? Seems a little hard to believe it could be that.

cpu is Athlon 64 3200+

 

[animalbrain]

sorry 512 ram not 515

 

[amuffin]

Are you running Win 7? You should at least get 1+ gig(s) of ram.

 

[animalbrain]

nah it's XP on that system. it could certainly use more ram, but I just dont think that could be what's causing this. simply installing those drivers makes windows unusable. even navigating to the control panel to uninstall the drivers was painful.

faulty card? definitely don't think it's a pci-e compatibility issue?

thanks for everyone's input on this

 

[rolli59]

It is possible that the discrete card is mapping some of your ram as reserved and the slow downs are because of the page file use.

 

[animalbrain]

Tried a fresh XP install and installed nothing but the vid drivers, rebooted, exact same problem again. When I look in the task manager, the cpu usage sits at 100% even though no programs at all are running. What would that mean? Uninstalled vid drivers again and checked, cpu usage meter goes back to normal. Also tried disabling all possible bios settings for the onboard video.

 

[amuffin]

Tried a fresh XP install and installed nothing but the vid drivers, rebooted, exact same problem again. When I look in the task manager, the cpu usage sits at 100% even though no programs at all are running. What would that mean? Uninstalled vid drivers again and checked, cpu usage meter goes back to normal. Also tried disabling all possible bios settings for the onboard video.

Get more ram?

 

[animalbrain]

could the geforce drivers alone seriously be that taxing to a system? It just doesn't seem reasonable that that's what's doing this. It causes the CPU usage to be at a constant 100% with zero applications running. It seems to me it's not so weak a system that installing a moderate video card like this would shut it down. Again, running on onboard video I could watch a 720p movie and obviously no trouble with basic PC use. I can't help but think it's an issue with the card or something? Windows resolution and graphics appear totally fine, it's just blasting the CPU for some reason having those drivers installed.