Warning! The Dell XPS 8700 series computer will absolutely, positively currently NOT work with Nvidia's newest and most powerful GTX 970 series and GTX 980 series video cards.
It will simply come up with a black screen no matter what preparations you make.
This is a known issue at both Dell and Nvidia and they claim they have been working on a solution for over a month.
In the meantime it is strongly suggested you do not consider purchase of a Dell computer if you want to use it with the latest, best and lowest power graphics card available.
By the same token if you have a Dell computer do not consider purchasing the latest and best Nvidia graphics card.
To this point in time neither Nvidia nor Dell have actually bothered to put in sufficient effort to actually fix it.
This problem appears to be true for all Nvidia GTX 970 and 980 Boards and also for additional Dell XPS models other than the 8700. The frustration level for those of us affected by this is extreme and has resulted in an incredible waste of our time, effort and money.
For those of you unlucky enough to have an XPS 8700 return your GTX 970 or 980 card or resell it on EBay - it is currently a useless and very expensive paperweight.
And the companies reselling these cards without bothering to mention this very well known incompatibility are just ripping us all off.
BTW it has absolutely nothing whatever to do with the power supply and an add in 600 watt power supply DOES NOT fix it.
It is a bios level incompatibility between the Nvidia card and the XPS's main board bios and it needs 5 or 6 hours of a competent bios engineer to fix it, apparently we are not worth his time.
Both Nvidia and Dell are completely at fault for not at least warning consumers about this very well known total incompatibility.
post edited by grmccray - 2014/10/18 17:14:42