(SOLVED) resume from suspend not working with 980 Ti, drivers 352 - 370, kernels 3.16 - 4.4

[JGB123321]

So I’ve joined just to say a big “Thank you!” to everyone who has contributed here, especially Naanoo whose answer and links saved my system from the trash heap and my faith in Linux which was wavering severely.
I upgraded my video card from a GTX 960 Strix (2Gb) to a GTX 1060 Strix (6Gb) (on a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 mobo, AMD FX 8350 @ 4.2Ghz, 16Gig DDR3 @ 2133mHz, Samsung Evo 960 ssd and 3Gig Barracuda HD).
What was working perfectly (Mint 17.3 Kde) turned to ***t, not only would it not sleep, but it no longer recognised the USB ports.
The usbs were related to an IOMMU setting in the bios and blacklisting that fixed the problem.
Blacklisting the nouveau driver in Grub, and adding a “disable-nouveau.conf” file to etc/modprobe.d/ fixed the sleep issue for me.
I discovered in the modprobe.d folder that the nvidia installer had attempted to blacklist nouveau by creating its own blacklist.conf file. This blacklisting attempt failed obviously. Perhaps because no entry was added to Grub?
Its obvious that the whole sleep issue is related to the nouveau driver not being effectively removed from the scene when the nVidia driver is installed.
By the way Im using nVidia 378 and a 3 series kernel installed by default when i reinstalled Mint 17.3 Kde.
Cheers guys, thanks for the guidance… there must be heaps of people out there suffering with this.

Anyone who is using an AMD FX Series (Vishera) CPU may wish to check out the ‘FX-8370, amd64-microcode_3.20160316.3_amd64’ links in my signature.