I have a GTX970 and have been trying to get a distro running with the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so far I have tried Ubuntu Mate and Mint (all Ubuntu family atm), in each case the driver installs fine and says a reboot is required, after rebooting, it thinks longer then normal, and then drops to a no input screen on my monitor. From a safe mode launch and terminal I have been able to purge nvidia and restore the default drivers, although recently messing with options and uninstalling xorg in mint I more or less hosed my install, so I am prepared to reinstall a distro. I'm at a loss as what to try next, Nvidia claims to support the GTX 970 since older version numbers, and I have tried recommended 361 and newer builds 37x, same issue. I need the proprietary drivers as I do game development so testing in Linux is one of the reasons I'm running this install. What are some troubleshooting steps, I'm at a loss what to try?

edencorbin,

Various suggestions for dealing with the GTX970 here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gamin...endly_distros/

So all the drivers I have tried to install are fast forwarded many versions from the ones discussed in this thread, only thing I really see is possibly installing an old driver, like Nvidia 346.72 could be a good idea? I have a feeling something else is up, I tried all outputs of my NVidia card, HDMI, DVI and display port. I wonder if it's confused by the intel graphics port (although I tried that too). About out of ideas.

I am starting to wonder if this has anything to do with my intel Haswell built in graphics (I've tried all ports) and GTX 970 and xorg nouveau. I have seen allot of reports of Nvidia GTX 970 working fine just by installing from the distro driver settings, yet for me no signal whenever I install nvidia drivers. Is there any way to make sure it doesn't use my intel builtin gfx, or any suggestions?

Have you run nvidia-xconfig or manually created an xorg.conf? It may just need that for X11 to use the NVDIA drivers. The Debian guidance may give some idea though, obviously, there are differences.
As to the onboard, I would disable it in BIOS just to be sure as, form what I gather, regardless of the OS onboard video can cause issues.

edencorbin,

I think that 273 may well be right about disabling the Intel graphics card in the BIOS.

That is definitely the case when installing a different ethernet card on my Gigabyte 3D BIOS (Dual UEFI) board.

The existing Intel EC must first be disabled.

Extract from manual:

There is this reference to Internal Graphics: