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Swapping nVidia cards... reinstalling the drivers necessary?

C

CrimsonWolf

Senior member
I'm swapping out a GTX 275 for a GTX 480. I'm already using the latest official drivers. Can I just swap the cards? Or do I need to uninstall drivers, yank the old card, put in new one, and reinstall?

I figure just the card swap will be OK, but I wanted to double check.
 
i'm wondering this myself because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. sometimes it doesnt like it even if i take out the card and put the exact same one back in! (anyway to be safe, i just completely uninstall, clean, install.)
 
Its not necessary. Pull the old card (you don't even have to uninstall), plug in the new and give Windows a few minutes to find the new hardware and install the drivers from the cache. I've switched out a lot of Nvidia cards these past few months and it works every time. The latest was last week from an 8800 GTX to a GTX 460. Its performing flawlessly. If for some reason you think its not behaving properly, uninstall, reinstall from the package installer.
 
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You know you really shouldn't have to, but by the time I do swap a newer video card there are usually newer drivers out so I end up uninstalling the old ones and reinstalling the new ones.

Since you are going from DirectX10 to DirectX11 you might want to consider it.
 
it wont take but a few seconds more time to uninstall the drivers before turning off the pc and then reinstalling them after you boot up with the new card.
 
Thanks all. Pretty sure the card wound up being a dud. 🙁

At first I just did the card swap. It recognized the new card without a hitch and all seemed well with the world. Well, five minutes into trying it out with Civ 5 it crashes. Then I tried Fallout 3, which froze up a couple times. Afterward, even just on the desktop, the driver kept crashing and recovering over and over again.

I uninstalled the drivers, ran driver sweep in safe mode, and reinstalled them... no luck, same problems. Did the same routine with the latest beta drivers... no dice.

I uninstalled all the drivers, put the old GTX 275 in, reinstalled the drivers, and everything was fine again.

I suppose the card was bad. I'm using an Antec Truepower New 750W power supply so it was definitely getting enough juice. Can't think of anything else it could've been. The computer has been solid stable otherwise lately.

Oh well, the shop refunded it without a fuss. It was an MSI card. I'll think about getting an EVGA card or just waiting to see what AMD's lineup looks like later this fall.
 
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