My main Christmas present this year was a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT for PCI-E 2.0. The problem is I cannot get it to work.

My old card was a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 and it ran on the same PCI-E slot I have placed the new card into.
I uninstalled all the drivers for this card, booted the computer into safe mode, and USED drivercleaner to wipe the remaining traces of the 6600 Drivers.

I then removed the 6600 and replaced it with the DUAL slot 9800.

The monitor doesn't seem to work when I plug it into the 9800 card(it doesn't work on either of the two slots), but it will work when plugged into the computer directly.

When I rebooted the computer(while plugged directly into the computer) windows recognized new hardware. However the 9800 wasn't what it recognized. The hardware wizard wanted me to install something called a VGA(I assumed this was the intergrated video card).

I inserted the 9800 installation disk and when the menu came up I chose to install the drivers. The following error message appears when I try to do this:
"The NVIDIA Setup Program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit."

I searched for a good few hours on the trusty Google and finally came to the conclusion that I needed to disable the intergrated video card. The only video card I could find in the device manager was the VGA(that was mentioned earlier). There was some error going on with it(I didn't investigate that matter), but I disabled it.

I rebooted the computer, and at that point windows didn't recognize any new hardware at all. When running dxdiag the VGA still appears as the video card.

Some more searching was involved and I decided to see if I could disable the VGA in BIOS. I haven't the slightest idea what motherboard I have, but after searching around in BIOS for a bit I couldn't find anything having to do with the VGA card.

When I was in BIOS I did notice that the video slot being used was PCI instead of PCI-E. I switched it to PCI-E, but I still haven't had any success with this.

When attempting to install the video drivers directly from the NVIDIA site I get the same message I do when I try to install from the CD. Also the card seems to be working(the fan is spinning) despite the fact that windows won't recognize it.

Also for some reason, even though no video cards are enabled, the computer appears normal. I mean that there is no color distortion and everything is working correctly. The screen and icons have reverted BACK into the 800x600 mode, but besides that everything is the same.

Here are the specifications of the card I'm trying to install:
EVGA
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT
512MB DDR3

And computer specifications:
Gateway E4300
Windows XP Professional SP3
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
1 GB System RAM
Direct X 9.0cI was under the impression that PCI-E 2.0 was backwards compatible. Am I wrong?

Apparently my system BIOS hasn't been updated since 2005...
That could be a problem.
I'll update that to see if it helps any.Quote from: HollowNobody on December 26, 2008, 09:10:55 PM

Apparently my system BIOS hasn't been updated since 2005...
That could be a problem.
I'll update that to see if it helps any.