So there I was, looking down the barrel of having to basically rebuild my home PC. It's been more than a month since the box stopped working, and after further research I came up with the following revised shopping list:

Component Model
CPU AM3 x4 640
RAM Kingston 4GB Kit(2Gx2) DDR3 1333
Motherboard GA-870A-UD3
CPU Fan Noctua NH-U9B-SE2

That motherboard recently gained an 'Editor's Choice' award from XBit Laboratories, which is nice.

However, Duncan commented on my previous post that maybe the hardware wasn't at fault. It was a good suggestion that I should really try and isolate what the cause of this problem is before just "throwing new hardware" at it (as he put it!).

So I scrounged around and found a spare old hard disk that I was able to plug in to the system and successfully installed a clean version of Windows 7. So far so good, but then I noticed something odd – Windows insisted that I just had a basic VGA adapter. Nevertheless I then installed the most recent NVidia driver (96.85) and rebooted. Eureka! It booted successfully.

Buoyed by this success, I then swapped back to the original boot disk and booted into "Safe Mode with Networking", located the display driver in the Device Manager and uninstalled the existing driver. I then rebooted Windows.

Rebooting worked ok, and I was now in VGA mode again. I then repeated the process of installing the NVidia driver and rebooted again… And it worked!

So we're now back working again, and I can leave my shopping list for another day 😀