I’ve set up a few machines using nvidia through the 5,6,7,8,9 and Gts series and after spending a day or two on each of the cards through the 5-8 series I gave up on the nvidia drivers with them, could only get them working properly on the geforce 9 and gts cards
I found they worked a lot better using the driver suse comes with, but I did have to make some changes to 50-monitor.conf and 50-screen.conf (found in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d) files by adding modes generated using cvt to get decent resolutions, may be worth you trying the same approach if you haven’t already