I'm having a real 'love/hate' relationship with this videocard. On one hand.... after thinking the card was defective on initial installation and boot up...(due to nothing displaying on screen), I was able to get it to boot with 344.11 drivers. Once booted it ran extremely fast and error-free. On the other hand, I could not run any other driver above 350.xx without strange happenings. After a lot of investigation, my original black/blank screen issue appears to be driver/timing related. Having now installed the newest Nvidia driver (353.30), my computer is detecting three displays...despite only being connected to a single monitor and a single projector. The odd thing is that after installing that driver and without a restart of the computer, the signal defaulted to 64 Hz instead of the usual 60 Hz. That condition will usually result in over-scan and black screen for any monitor with a max of 60 Hz. The other issue I am now experiencing with 353.30, is that on trying to open certain programs they open minimized to the taskbar. I can hover the mouse and see a popup indicating that the item is open and running... but I cannot maximize it. The previous driver did not exhibit the issue described above...though it too, showed no BIOS screen at power on (just black screen to Windows splash screen). It also had a longer than normal boot time, which actually diminished to approximately 45 seconds (as opposed to the original 1-2 minutes) over time. It was all very, very strange, since I had not done any additional updates or added any new software.
There's a BIOS update for your videocard which... Maybe you should try flashing this. However from the programs which are opening on absent displays I'd assume that this is a software configuration issue - more likely related to your OS displays config than Nvidia or anything else. Have you tried hitting Win+P and selecting "PC screen only" there?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sbq117ym442u3ep/64Hz.JPG?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/iw7dpldbizfy2rf/3 monitors.JPG?dl=0 I already have F11 which is the latest for my card. The programs aren't opening on absent displays...just minimized to the sole monitor. See the attached links for what I believe is causing the issue. If at reboot the driver is setting 64Hz instead of 60Hz any monitor with a max refresh of 60 will display a black screen.
Why do you have such strange display config? Is that intentional? What happens if you use "PC screen only"? Did you try installing a proper driver for your display? If it's really using a non-PnP driver then the card can't setup the output in a proper way because it doesn't know what your display capabilities are.
I keep asking the same question about the number of display options. Having now disconnected the projector, I should have just one display...and yet they're two showing. The main Acer display is identified as display two. It is connected using an HDMI cable. No other displays or projectors are connected when the screenshots were captured. What you were seeing in the previous links was the configuration, prior to the computer restart. The ones below are after the restart. https://www.dropbox.com/s/s6936zu8u1v68em/RAMDAC.gif?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6vuqusledswmx2/display driver info.gif?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/89lpn8ya4d6pue3/display ident.gif?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxq3xilefp8cmmp/display_options.gif?dl=0
It really is... There are no other displays connected and yet the sole one is shown as Display 2 with a phantom shown as 1. I have the Gigabyte GV-N970WF30C-4GD which has 1x DVI-I, 1x DVI-D, 1x HDMI and 3x DisplayPort.
You can go into device manager, check "Show hidden devices" in "View" menu and delete all inactive entries under "Monitors". You can do this after uninstalling the GPU driver and going into safe mode. But this is definitely an OS configuration problem as multi-display capabilities are managed by OS and not the driver since Vista. Btw, what does the driver CPL show in "Setup multiple displays" section?