I wanted to share this just in case it helps others... this might be an obvious known issue for seasoned testers but I did not know. When I got my kingpin RMA in my system, timespy would crash immediately no matter what I did after the benchmark starts. I had no +overclock, no +power, normal bios. I was getting really upset and walked away for a bit. Then I tried it with real world gaming and found that the card was performing on par versus my old card.
Last night, I uninstalled/reinstalled NVIDIA drivers and PX1. After some tinkering, I found that the HWM and OSD toggles in PX1 were causing the timespy benchmark to crash immediately following the start of any Timespy benchmark. Once I turned those toggles off, everything was golden and it seems that my RMA (though there are some dings and scratches :( ) is a very good card. It seems like there is some kind of conflict between the monitoring functions of these two pieces of software - PX1 and timespy. Hope this helps someone else that is frustrated with measuring performance.