Driver or GPU?

So, here’s the deal: my graphics card was working perfectly fine just a few days ago. I actually updated the drivers recently and everything was smooth sailing. But today, I decided to wipe macOS and start fresh. As soon as the installation process tries to kick in the graphics driver, the screen just goes black and stays frozen. This is on my laptop—the Intel integrated graphics install without a hitch and work totally fine, but the second I try to get the NVIDIA GeForce GTX series running, everything blacks out. I’ve tried installing directly through the Device Manager, but—black screen. I tried downloading the driver straight from the manufacturer's site, and—black screen again. Even after a full reboot, the exact same thing happens during the driver install. To make matters more confusing, I did swap out the thermal paste on both the CPU and the GPU just about a week ago.

Any ideas on what I should do?

How much thermal paste did you end up putting on the GPU? You might have gone a little overboard...!?