[J.J.]

Sounds like it might be a display problem, what is your motherboard/chipset make and model?

I had very similiar problems when I took out the crappy mfg's 4mb video card and dropped in a voodoo 5 5500 64mb agp. I ended up on the phone with support, and had to change a jumper that was creating conflicts with the increased thru-put. - as i recall (dimly!), I also had to reassign irq #'s ???? in the CMOS. I certainly hope someone who is sure about this responds (they will ) but, I remember that darn safemode, and messing with display settings did nothing.
having a via chipset and an AMD processor has proven to be a serious pain, as I have ended up talking to the folks at AZZA who built my board more than a few times in the last couple of years. Start with help for your card, then to your board builders, if you don't have a pre-made box. good luck! btw, does tech support website for your new card mention any probs with the DDR memory and old bus architecture? I had to reconfig my cmos again when i put in the extra 80g HD and the cd-rw, master and slave the drives, and change from DMA to UDMA. *grr* old junk - can't wait to update!