Never asked for cheek TBH.

How am I to know you do not own one ?

Monitoring software and/or an unstable system to begin with could be the culprits. You run any stability tests like LinX recently?

I no longer keep Precision running when playing, I only apply the fan speed at startup and that's it. I do monitoring through a desktop gadget now (one that doesn't use Rivatuner) and experience no lag/micro-stutter/crashes.

Try doing without Precision for now. Just play without precision running and without OSDs on for both your screen and your G15 Keyboard. If you set your settings to apply at startup, you do not need to launch precision at startup for those settings to be applied.

If that doesn't solve it, do a full stability test roundup on everything in your system. Even on stock, some components (from what I can tell, it seems like the memory or the FSB could be the issues) could fail to act properly.

Drivers could also be an issue. Going from a 9800GTX to a 480 will require a full driver sweeper of your old drivers. But, since driver sweeper doesn't work on 25x.xx drivers, the only way to go is a clean install then installing the latest driver if you're willing to go that far.

If all else fails, it could be the card. Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective found that out doing a Far Cry 2 benchmark on a 480. He had similar symptoms to what you described play out in this video: http://www.vimeo.com/10384961

Can testing a molex connection be an accurate judge as to how much power the 12v rail is putting out or do I need to test the 6 and 8 pin connectors directly? Could you link me to a diagram showing which ports on those connectors should be used for testing? I reinstalled Windows just for the heck of it and installed only the graphic drivers w/o the hd audio and physx drivers (removed the executables before installation). I still get crashes. If the power supply works perfectly and reverting back to the P09 bios doesn't fix the issue I'll see if I can RMA the card (as a last resort). Could this be a motherboard issue as well? My first MB died on me a year ago and they sent me this refurbished board as a replacement (it works just fine though). Any suggestions?
 
Edit: I think I found a temporary fix. The overclock on the SCed GPU seems unstable so I lowered the settings to that of a normal GTX 480 and haven't crashed yet. If my PSU looks fine after testing it I may send the card back.