13.10 Nvidia Drivers

I am having a brutal time getting Ubuntu up and running on a new machine I recently put together. The key hardware is:

i7 4770k

Gigabyte Z87MX-D3H motherboard
16G Corsair Vengeance RAM @ 1333MHz (not clocked up to 2133MHz yet)
MSI GTX770 GPU
Samsung SSDs

I can install 13.10 and get the bootloader working without a problem, but I cannot get the Nvidia drivers installed. I have tried the following processes:

1) Installing via aptitude. Attempting to install nvidia-current or nvidia-319 results in a single blinking cursor ('_') on a black screen upon boot. Some more details on this install process. With the GPU installed I am unable to bring up a virtual console (Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6 freezes the desktop until I Ctrl+Alt+F7 back in), and therefore I am unable to kill X/lightdm. Instead I boot into recovery mode when running integrated graphics to run the install. When I reinstall the GPU, I see the blinking cursor. Booting into recovery yields the following log fragment before the system locks up:

[1.104119] hda-intel: Disabling MSI
[1.104173] hda-intel 0000:01:00.1: Handle VGA-switcheroo audo client
[1.104254] hda-intel 0000:01:00.1: Disabling 64bit DMA
[1.109000] hda-intel 0000:01:00.1: Enable delay in RIRB handling
[1.126262] microcode: CPU1 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.127582] microcode: CPU2 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.127871] microcode: CPU3 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.128209] microcode: CPU4 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.128519] microcode: CPU5 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.128823] microcode: CPU6 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9

[1.129136] microcode: CPU7 sig=0x306c3, pf=0x2, revision=0x9
[1.129482] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.00 , Peter Oruba
[1.130199] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver
[1.139577] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[1.139634] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
_  <-- system hangs, blinking cursor indefinitely

2) Installing via Nvidia's install script (Nvidia*.run) with the GPU installed. When I boot into recovery and attempt to run this, I see an error about the system not being able to write to /tmp. Further investigation suggests that the filesystem is mounted as read-only, however I am unable to remount it (sudo mount -o remount,rw)

3) Installing via Nvidia's install script (Nvidia*.run) with the GPU removed, on integrated graphics. The script self-diagnostics all fail, but after proceeding anyway and ignoring the no Nvidia hardware error it says something about nvidia.ko not being loaded. Poking around in recovery suggests that the driver was not fully installed.

As you can see, I have been iterating on this issue but to no avail. Thanks for your time and I will appreciate any advice you can provide.