Do I need another RMA? N560GTX Ti Twin Frozr II/OC

Question

Hey folks. Hi Svet.
Question: So, uh, is there something wrong with 560 GTX Ti based cards?!
I bought the card in February. It went flaky and was RMA'd in June.
Thread here: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=149374.msg1109239#msg1109239
They sent me someone elses' repaired card, or a new card, but it hasn't lasted even 5 months of near zero use! I put in the replacement, and it seemed to work fine; ran all benchmarks and tests when I first installed it. And never gave it another thought.
I haven't had much need for 3D or gaming, I certainly haven't had time to game all summer. I mostly web browse and photo edit, and for that it's working fine. I'm mostly in linux and the only OpenGL work I do is rendering/modelling in Blender. In case you don't know, consumer 3D like 3D Vision doesn't work under linux.
Fast forward to today. Some family were over, the kids wanted to play with the cool 3D glasses, so I fire up Win7x64 and an OLD game (TOB: HL2 & Portal) and it looks horrible!
The white "fire flies" are everywhere, it looks kind of like a sports stadium filled with camera flashes going off. The textures are not only tearing, but the colors are freaky (mostly primary colors - white, magenta, blue) and tons of flickering. The textures are flickering individually. 3D or non-3D it's the same. You can still play, but of course you can't see. And eventually, it locks, and you have to reboot.
Trying to run Kombustor at just 1280x720 results in garbled video and finally the app crashes or hangs. The "furry" text is all interconnected, like there's extra faces or something.
The card has never been overclocked (beyond factory OC)... 880/1760/2100 MHz. Re: temps, in 2D it's always around 34C (and it never gets over 54C before crashing.)
The system is stable and runs just fine, until you throw something graphically-intensive at it, like gaming. Then the card goes boom.
This is with the 285.62 driver, I've also tried the 280.26 from the MSI site with the same results.
I'm pretty sure this is a hardware issue, the reason I'm posting before RMAing is, what should I do here? I do NOT want to RMA this thing just to have it die again. I want a stable system, period. The card should last indefinitely, at least until it's so old no one would bother using it! And with solid caps replacing that first-to-fail point of electrolytics, this should be easily attainable! I know MSI won't ever say if there's a design flaw with the chip nor the card, but you guys are another story. Could I, for example, get an RMA unit and then flash it so it will be a slower, ordinary 560GTX? Obviously I could, what I mean is, would this make the card survive longer? I'll take stable over speed any day of the week.
As you can imagine, I'm frustrated. And POOR, which makes matters worse - I can't swap it out even if I wanted to.
Well, thanks for reading. Any help appreciated.
System
Mob: MSI P67A-GD65 (B3)  BIOS 1.F0
CPU: 2600 Non-K (no overclocking)
Vid: MSI N560GTX Ti Twin Frozr II/OC  BIOS 70.24.11.00.00, add. power from separate 18A rails.
RAM: 4x 4G CORSAIR Vengeance PC3-12800 (XMP 1600), 8-8-8-24
PSU: Sparkle SCC-850AF +3.3~24A /+5V~30A /+12V: 16A/16A/18A/18A/18A ~86A total
OS : Win7Pro SP1 x64 w/ 285.62 / linux x86_64 w/ 290.10
Drives:
OS: 2x RAID0 OCZ Vertex2 240G
Data: 5x Hitachi 2TB array on LSI MegaRAID SAS MR9240-8i
Optical: 2x BD-RE DL (Sony Optiarc 5730S & LiteOn iHBS212)
UPS:
Tripp-Lite Smart Pro 2.6KVA
(not that a UPS matters, just making the point that it's always fed nice, clean power.)

Answer 1

Thanks, I've fixed it up.
I've tried to update the bios cux since a few days, the vga doesn't keep 60 fps in game when recording with fraps. Sometimes it goes to 55 and then it is hard to play. The game is NFS Hot Pursuit 2010 and up to now I could play it while recording at 60fps fix.
I use AB profile overclocked to 938 (core) and 2205 (memory) with voltage at 1.012