Sapphire HD 7750 Installation Issues

[aez5]

I am trying to install a Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB GDDR5 card onto my gf's Dell Studio 540 (specs listed below). I've done the following already:

1. Removed all old graphics card drivers
2. Booted with no graphics card in. Went to device manager and disabled integrated graphics. Shut down.
3. Inserted graphics card. Booted, plugged in only to the graphics card (via dvi) and got a standard display at a nice resolution.
4. Downloaded and installed AMD catalyst.
5. Checked device manager: the card is recognized.

This is where the problem comes in. When I try to boot, the windows logo comes up just fine, but once it finishes loading on that screen, instead of getting the log-in screen, I get a screen with a mouse pointer and either a bunch of fuzzy lines or just a black background. After about a minute, the usual Windows 7 "Please Wait" screen flashes for a second, and then the screen turns blue (no, it's not the BSOD, there is no text). I can boot into safe mode just fine, and get a display through the graphics card at a decent resolution and the device manager lists AMD Radeon HD 7700 series as the display adapter, so I'm fairly certain that this isn't a hardware problem. If I uninstall the AMD drivers from safe mode and reboot, everything works fine, and I get a display through the graphics card.

Please help.

Specs on the PC: Dell Studio 540, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, Intel Core 2 Quad 2.33 GHz, 6 GB RAM

 

[Blitzvogel]

What a coincidence lol, I just bought a 7750 to put in my GF's Gateway yesterday lol. It may have been heresy, but I didn't think to disable the HD 2000 IGP (she has an i3-2100 in her machine). We put the card in, connected the video cable and it booted from the get go and once drivers were installed it was perfect.

It's possible there may be an issue with the card being PCI E 3.0 and not whatever older standard the Dell uses (pre-2.0?). But I don't see that really being an issue. Maybe you should try and older driver.

 

[Yuriman]

Probably unrelated but I see no reason to disable the onboard. Set it to boot from PCI-e first if there is an option.

 

[aez5]

Probably unrelated but I see no reason to disable the onboard. Set it to boot from PCI-e first if there is an option.

I tried it without disabling first. Disabling the onboard was a last-ditch effort.

NUSNA_Moebius: do you happen to know what PSU your gf has? Any idea how far back I'd want to go on the old driver?

 

[Blitzvogel]

It's the PSU that came with her computer originally. I'd guess it's probably 350 to 400 Watts. Prebuilts tend to have PSUs in the 300W to 400W range I've noticed. It's possible that your GF's Dell doesn't have an ample enough power supply to power the PCI-E x16 slot which is 75 Watts if I remember correctly. 7750s I think use about 70W normal full load. As far as driver goes, try going back a few months or a year, or even the one on the disc that came with a card.

Old Northbridge iGPs integrated into the chipset are a different animal to the on-CPU iGPs of current, but I still don't think you have to specifically disable the iGP. Try installing the graphics card and skip disabling the onboard. Install a bit older driver and see what happens.

 

[aez5]

Thanks. I'll give it a try with the old drivers to see if that helps, and report back once I've done so. Any other ideas in case that doesn't work?

 

[aez5]

I tried installing CCC 13.1 and got exactly the same outcome.

Any other ideas?

 

[Raduque]

I tried installing CCC 13.1 and got exactly the same outcome.

Any other ideas?

Test the GPU in another PC, test another GPU in this PC.