After installing GTX 980 driver monitor goes to sleep on Windows 8.1 boot

[Bloated Maggot]

Hello Tom's community,

Long time lurker here, finally moving out of the shadows. I have enjoyed the many great questions and answers asked in the forums so would like to thank everyone for making this such a great resource for all PC-based questions.

I always wanted to build a PC from scratch and was recently more or less forced to do so (which is a good thing, unfortunately it's not working quite yet).

Prologue
After having bought a 2nd hand PC I realised that the GPU that came with it (GTX 780Ti) was not very future proof, hence I swapped it out for a GTX 980. Unfortunately, the board I was using (Asus P8P67 Pro) had the old stepping, which led to not being able to update the BIOS, which led to a compatibility issue.

So, I bought a new board. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get my setup to work either...

My Setup
i7 2600k
MSI GTX 980 4G
Gigabyte z68x ud5 b3
Teamgroup 8GB ddr3 RAM
Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 750W PSU
HP Pavilion 23xi Monitor
Wireless Card
Soundcard (Asus STX)

The Problem
After having installed the new board, having moved all components to a different case and getting myself a new cpu cooler I booted for the first time...lo and behold, it works!

Exciting.

Now, to install Windows 8.1 pro over USB...no problem, it works! I can login and everything seems to be working just fine.

Next up: driver installation. As I had not seen the GPU work yet, this was the first driver I wanted to install. Oh-uh, halfway through the driver installation my monitor goes to sleep. Reboot: Windows load screen for a few seconds, then the monitor goes to sleep again...

Searching for a solution
System recovery makes me boot into Windows again. I try to install the newest driver with the same result.

I do a clean Windows install and try to install the drivers through Windows, not utilising the NVIDIA application. The Installation works fine, until I restart my PC: monitor goes to sleep again.

System recovery again and I try to install with the NVIDIA application. Weirdly, this now finishes without my monitor falling asleep, but when I reboot the same problem persists.

Ok, let's try this again. Clean install Windows, then Windows update and restart. Strangely enough, even though I have not touched the graphics driver this time, my monitor goes to sleep after reboot.

Help!
I am not sure what to do next and would like to ask for help from the community. The following is an elimination of problem causes with my argumentation. It would be great if someone more knowledgeabe and experienced can confirm or rebuke these assumptions.

1) Monitor - no drivers are available for the 23xi, meaning none is used and the monitor cannot be the problem, right?

2) The DVI cable between the monitor and gpu is not faulty, otherweise there would be a problem without having the drivers installed as well.

3) GPU - can it be the GPU? It seems to be working fine without advanced drivers.

4) Motherboard - the latest F10 BIOS is loaded and the Z68 chipset should be compatible with the GTX 980. Can it be the motherboard (again, ffs)?

5) PSU - everything is connected and working fine, no problems here

6) CPU/RAM - I don't see how these can have any influence on the described problem.

Next steps
Please advise me on what to do next. I will see if I can get a new Windows iso to make sure it's not a Windows problem, as I found it very strange that the problem surfaced after installing Windows updates. Other than that, I'm uncertain how to fix this....

Thank you for reading this long post.

Kind regards,
BM

 

[hang-the-9]

If you put the old video card in, does it work? Try a different output on the new card.

It may be RAM or CPU, everything goes through those and anything a bit off can cause issues. Try one stick at a time or a spare stick. You want to rule out everything that is pretty easy to test first, you don't want to have any maybe this or maybe that happening, you want to know for sure it's not RAM or the cable or the connection type, so test them. If changing things there won't help, you know to go on to something else.

The power supply is a suspect, although you have a good quality one so that is less of an issue, but it may still be faulty.

Test the video card in another system that can run it (meaning a friends gaming rig or something like that), if that is stable you can start worrying about the issue being with another component. RAM is easy to swap to test, do that first.

Then power supply (maybe borrow your friends or have a local PC shop swap it for a test unit).

You may want to contact the video card vendor also to check things.

 

[RobCrezz]

check you are plugging the monitor into the gtx 980, not the motherboard, as when its loading windows it may be defaulting to the 980 (not the IGPU).

 

[Ghost Hacks]

Does your monitor go to sleep if you boot in Windows Safe Mode?

 

[ice2kewl]

My friend had a no video signal issue with his gtx970. He had to change a setting in bios. Default was set to PCE, he changed to PCI. This resolved.

 

[Bloated Maggot]

Hmm, seems my comment from a few days back was not posted...strange.

Thank you all for your time and comments...I believe I made a really stupid mistake.

Before installing the gpu driver, I did not actually install the chipset driver...doing this solved the problem. The only strange thing is that my monitor only works with a HDMI to DVI converter...but at least it works.

I'm glad I learned a bit more and looking at your comments, None suspected me to be this stupid ;-)

Thanks again.