h8-1214 Upgrading from an NVIDIA GTX 660 ti to a GTX 970

[BigWillR]

Okay so for awhile now I've been running a 660 ti as my video card and as the subject suggests, I'm trying to swap it out for 970. After uninstalling all my 660 ti drivers I switched over to the 970 and attempted to boot it up. The blue hp bios boot screen is displayed and it just sits on this screen. I can leave it there for 10 mins (as long as I decided to sit there before trying something esle) or hit esc to enter bios which makes the screen switch to black but nothing happens. I tried resetting the CMOS but nothing. I can drop the 660 ti back in and the computer will boot back up as normal. The 970 is a hand me down from a friend who just upgraded to a 1080 ti but the card works so that isn't an issue. I've attempted reseating it and fiddling with all the connections but no matter what, when the 970 is in the computer it won't boot but toss the 660 ti in and it boots right up without issue. Any suggestions for other things I can try? Contacted NVIDIA and they checked everything over on their end and showed everything should be compatible just that I should check that HP doesn't have a BIOS restriction on the GTX 970 but not sure where I would go to ask that other than here.

My rig:

M3970AM-HP   Motherboard

FX-6100   AMD CPU

2x 8 GB Corsair Vengance RAM

840 EVO SSD (OS)

WD Blue HDD (Storage)

850W Thermaltake Bronze PSU

ASUS Xonar DGX Sound Card

Both GPUs are NVIDIA brand 

BIOS Version: 7.16

[Photoray002 · Accepted solution]

Hello @BigWillR

Your Windows 7 machine uses a legacy bios. The GTX 970 requires a UEFI bios.

It wont work on that HP. The best you could upgrade to would be a GTX 760 that has a legacy switch that will run on the legacy bios. But If you can find one, It wont be that much of an upgrade.

Sorry.