SOLVED Arch Linux and Nvidia 35x drivers & Gnome

I have the following system:

Asus Z97-WS
I7 4790K
2 X 8 G ram
120G Intel SSD
480G Crucial SSD
GTX 660


I was trying to play Shadows of Mordor but got a little popup about needing Nvidia drivers 352 or greater so I went to install them and I litterally broke my system to a basically unuseable state. I ended up doing a fresh install because after 6 hours of trying to downgrade and simply getting

Every time I tried to log in. Anyways wiped fresh install and I still can't get the Nvidia drivers greater than 340 to install and actually work. The ones from the repos dont seem to install the modules (an lsmod |grep nvidia returns nothing). So I tried both the 352 and 355 .run files from Nvidia's website. The modules are installed and functional this way but I have the same error when starting Gnome.

Things I have tried:

Updated MOBO bios (because why not?)
reseated the video card
swapped the video card with a spare
5 X fresh installations (including to a spinning rust drive instead of the SSD)
Blew out the entire system for dust (again because why not)
Reseated/Swapped power cables to the GPU
Installed nvidia drivers from Arch repos
Installed nvidia drivers from their website
ran memtest for 5+ hours
reseated ram
blacklisted nouveau
uninstalled xf86-video-nouveau
added 'nvidia' to mkinitcpio.conf MODULES section and reran mkinitcpio -p linux

At this point I am at a loss. Here are some sample log files

I don't game, so I don't know much about video driver installation except when GPU folding. See this thread which discusses nvidia driver installation in Linux.

Its not a problem with Nvidia driver installation in general. Its these specific drivers. The 340xx series installs just fine as does the 304. Its specifically the 35x series and above

But thanks for chiming in!

I'm actually using the 346.72 drivers for my GPU folding, but I believe other team members are using the 35xx drivers, albeit in Ubuntu or Zorin.

I'd be interested to learn what is missing/different, perhaps some proprietary software that Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives (like Zorin) provide, whereas Arch or Debian would not.

So of all things the fix was to install intel-ucode package and regenerate my grub.cfg. Apparently the new drivers require a microcode update...