[Inspector Lagomorf]

Please leave your NVIDIA/AMD biases at the door for this post.

I'll make this as simple as possible. Basically, I gave a friend of mine my old eVGA NVIDIA GT 640 video card, and attempted to install it into an Asus Essentio PC. I installed the card, then went online and got the drivers and installed those. Rebooted the computer.

It boots. Windows splash screen loads fine. Then the splash screen graphics get messed up and lines appear all over the screen. When it finally gets to the login screen, the display is completely messed up (640x480 resolution, 4-bit graphics), the CPU fan speeds up to jet-engine levels, and the device manager shows the driver crashed with a code 43... If I uninstall the drivers, the card seems to work fine, though obviously it can't be used to do any gaming without the proper drivers.

Tried installing different sets of drivers, doing a clean install each time - first the newest set of drivers, then the oldest set of drivers. The only thing I haven't tried yet is updating the motherboard firmware. The power supply in the computer meets the minimum wattage required for this card.

Any ideas?

[Person of Color]

Blow compressed air into the slot, and then update the motherboard BIOS if you still have issues.

There's a chance the card got damaged in just the right spot during transit and is no longer working.

Sometimes hardware just fails on it's own. Back when I had my old shitheap Asus G51 laptop, I went to make a Boston creme donut with my cock and couldn't get the video drivers to work. The GTX 260M shit the bed.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Crossposting my findings:

The computer is actually running a relatively up-to-date version of the BIOS. The PSU in the computer, on the other hand, has a maximum wattage of 350W while the GT640 has a minimum requirement of... yep, 350W. So the computer kicks into overdrive to run the card but ultimately fails to do so since it's currently struggling with load from other devices in the computer.

It runs my NVIDIA GT 8600 just fine. Probably because it's a lower-end card.

[Person of Color]

Test it in another computer.

Quality is more relevant than wattage.

Antec 350w is better than Ching Dow Peeeing "350w."

The 640 runs off the PCI-E slot for power. Unless your PSU has a bad 12v rail it shouldn't be an issue, period.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Sadly it seems you're right. The issue was not the PSU. Even with the new PSU installed, the video card failed as it did before. It must have gotten damaged during transit.

On the bright side, there's now a 750W PSU in the computer, which means my friend can upgrade to any GPU they please.
I never liked the GT640 anyway.