Graphics Card Help

Factual Questions
1

I need somee advice on getting a new graphics card up and running.
My basic spec atm is:

2.8 GHz AMD
ASUS mobo (I think)
1GB Ram
6800GT
450W power supp (not sure which tbh)

Disclaimer: I am a bit ignorant of hardware issues and kind of fudge things through by overinstalling drivers and not properly cleaning up, hence some of the issues I get.

The 6800gt died the other day. Just connecting to power output receives absolutely nothing. So I scrapped it and bought a simple replacement 7600gs,. The card was initially unrecognised, bearing in mind I did my usual of sticking the card in and expecting everything to be ok. It wasn’t.

Uninstalled the geforce drivers from safe mode and reinstalled in normal. Should say here that I use the machine for games, predominantly WOW atm. Got a good resolution on the desktop (the 7600 being recognised) but crashing in seconds when logging to Wow. I am using latest Nvidia drivers, 94.71 or thereabouts.
Specifically, I have the Nvidia panel installed and selected 1280x768 ish. Looks great. Appears to be working fine. Launch WoW. Starting logging in and system freezes requiring a hard boot. There is a fair bit going on in the login screen with hi res graphics in background which I presume is causing the issue.

So, to my questions. I have two options

  1. Resolve the current issues. I’d approach this by downloading Everest and id’ing my chipset. Then getting latest mobo drivers. If that doesn’t help, try earlier versions of card drivers say 91.x (incidentally, can someone tell me of OpenGL drivers are included in the Geforce driver sets?).
    Or. I could uninstall the card and drivers and replace with the archaic 4200i. Get that working. Uninstall that. and clean up dilligently. Then reapply the new card and drivers.

  2. Uninstall and reinstall the old 4200i. Then rollback to factory settings and apply the new card. This obviously has the drawback of my having to update everything on my machine again. But does have the benefit of a nice clean playing surface.

My question is, is there something obvious I can do to resolve this, perhaps based on your experience with these cards.? Which of these approaches would you recommend? I’m heading towards 2) but need to make sure that I do the setup in the right order first time round. Something I am usually incapable of doing…

Thanks for any help you can offer.

2

Is that a passively cooled (no fan on the heatsink) Geforce 7600GS? I know those cards can run really hot when 3d mode kicks in, and the temperature protection system might be kicking in. You can check the temperature by going to your Display Properties > Settings tab > Advanced > Geforce 7600 GS tab > Temperature Settings.

3

From a few seconds after booting up, 55c. Which I think is within parameters.