New MB / GPU - serious problem [790x chipset / HD 5750]

Hail geeks,

Currently tearing my hair out in frustration. I am running Vista 64 with 4GB ram, AMD quad 2.6GHZ, and had a ASUS M3N72-D motherboard (with NVIDIA nForce 750a chipset). GPU is Asus EAH5750 (with ATI Radeon HD 5750 chip).

All was fine but the MB was getting croaky, started to fail to boot, so I have bought a new MB, a Gigabyte MA790x-UD3P (with AMD 790X / SB750 chipset), mainly because it has crossfire, though I only have 1 graphics card currently.

The graphics card will not boot with an ATI driver. BIOS post fine, windows starts, windows loading bar appears, but then screen goes black (sometimes I get a badly distorted blue screen crash). The new MB does not have onboard GPU, but in safe mode, it boots fine and graphics work ok. If I remove the graphics driver, and delete it, it boots normally using a generic VGA driver.

I have deleted all legacy drivers I can find (old MB had nvidia onboard GPU) so I have killed those too, including the hidden device drivers in the Device Manager.

I have flashed the BIOS with the latest update from the Gigabyte website.

There is no onboard GPU so I cant try to boot without the graphics card, and I dont have a older spare.

I have tried Driver Sweeper, and cleaned all old drivers that way.

I have tried the latest graphics driver from ATI, and the previous 2 sets of drivers.

Nothing makes any difference. It is as if any ATI driver is toxic for the graphics card when in the new MB.

The graphics card is PCI-E 2.1, and the MB is PCI-E 2.0 - I read it should be backwards compatible though.

Has anyone heard of a bizarre incompatibility between 790x MB chipset and HD 5750 GPU chipset?

Is there anything else I could try?

 

OK, I have a silly question I have to ask.

Did you uninstall the old graphics card completely BEFORE or AFTER you installed the new one?

If you don't completely remove not only the software from Add/Remove Programs, and the hardware driver from Device Manager BEFORE you shut down and pull the old card, it is what I call "asking for it".

Trouble, that is.

Halo is correct that you most likely will have to do a fresh install, or a repair at the very least (if that is an option in your copy of Vista) to get all your hardware set correctly as far as drivers go regarding the mobo. Personally, I like to match ATI for ATI, or nVidia for nVidia when it comes to mobo/graphics, but it's not an absolute necessity.

 

The graphics card didnt change, though I only removed drivers after the new MB was installed.

However I ended up re-installing Vista anyway, (windows setup launched from Safe mode), and unbelievably the same problem occurred after installation. I didnt wipe the hard drive, and the original windows installation /files were kept, though not functional. As soon as I installed the graphics card driver, the new install wouldnt boot either. It is either some kind of serious compatibility problem (despite being ati / ati), or the the new MB is duff. Hard to see how a broken MB would only show a fault with a certain driver though.

Anyway I put the old MB back in, the windows reinstall seems to have given it a new lease of life.