Artifacting could be a couple things. A faulty driver or a bad reaction to the drivers can cause artifacting. Artifacts after being under a load can also be the early signs of overheating. In very rare cases an unstable power supply 12v rail can cause a card to artifact. And, as  you suspect in this case, a faulty card can also cause artifacting. 
 
First thing I'd suggest doing is checking your load temps. Run OC Scanner, and see how high the temps get. Typically you'll see the temps in the high 70c to high 80c range with your card. If you're getting up in to the 90c range, then your card is overheating. If it is, there's a couple things you can do. First, blow the card out of any dust built up over time, and check for foreign material that may be blocking airflow, especially bits of clear plastic. If you're comfortable doing so, taking the heat sink off and replacing the thermal paste could help too if you're comfortable doing so. 

If the card isn't overheating, the next thing I'd test is the drivers. Sometimes older cards like your 400 series, the 500 series, and 600 series don't react well to the later drivers. To eliminate the drivers as an issue, I find that version 314.22 works really well with older cards. If you still get artifacting with the 314.22 drivers, we can narrow the problem down to a hardware issue.

the last thing I'd check would be the 12v rail from the power supply. Check it in the BIOS if you don't have a multimeter handy. In the BIOS, Look for a menu called something like Hardware Monitor, PC Health, HW Monitor, etc. The 12v rail should be stable and be between 11.5v and 12.5v, and it shouldn't fluctuate much if at all. If it does fluctuate more than every 10 or 15 seconds, or it's outside these ratings, the 12v rail may be failing and causing your issue. The BIOS reading is just a baseline reading at an idle state though, so it could be a false positive if the fluctuations don’t happen very often or only under high load. This isn't a definitive test the way testing another power supply is, but it can at least give us a good idea of how the power supply is doing.
 
If the 12v rail is steady and within spec, you can pretty safely assume the card is faulty. If you can test the card in another system and see if the artifacting happens there, you can confirm this for sure.

The card is definitely overheating then. If replacing the thermal paste doesn't help, then it's definitely the card. Unfortunately you don't have a high enough post count to post a link yet, but I have seen several guides that are pretty good out there. I would check out a couple and pick the one you like the best to follow. It's pretty straight forward, not all that different from installing an aftermarket CPU cooler.

After replacing the thermal paste the temps are in the low 90s with the Furry E (GPU core burner).
 
Edit: Still Artifacting and then crashing it must be the card itself I am pretty sure I applied the thermal paste in the right way (MX-4). Already sent a RMA request.

The serial number sticker on the back of the card and on the box should be the same if the box is the original. 

Good catch that you were able to still find the sticker.  For anyone else, if the sticker falls off and won't stay on, let EVGA Support know what's happening, and then keep the sticker in a safe place, in case you need to RMA the card at some point.

Definitely lucky.  Guard that sticker with your life.