Okay so I called up EVGA support, turns out I didn't test my graphics card properly. I just disabled the card from the device manager, he told me to completely pull the card. I pulled it and did some gaming (it was terrible 5 fps), but no crashes.... but then I thought; if the graphics card is out of the system it's not really pulling as much power? So how do you tell what's at fault???

I did do some more testing. I downloaded afterburner, and underclocked the crap out of the card to 65% power limit... gamed for 3 hours with that last night on two different games and didn't have any crashes where normally I would have crashes. The performance was noticeably less (dipping in some spots, but overalll playable).  Thoughts???