See now not all people with these cards are having problems, which leads me to believe for some of you guys it's a hardware problem.

And there is a difference in the brand of card you buy. Zotac/XFX and a few others, it's best to buy their stock card as their cooling is and voltage regulation is not always there. Sure they may release a few good products, but they're mostly trash. MSI /ASUS / EVGA use a higher grade cooling system and components. MSI will tell you on their website that they're using military grade caps and VRMs, which these things do make a difference, especially in factory overclocked versions. Alot of the cards from the latter three have much better cooling,HQ components, and are usually speced to draw in a little more power than the others. My experience (and others) point to much more stable operation with these. An old ASUS 980 I had actually ran cool enough in some situations that the card would completely cut off the fans. Kinda freaked me out when I saw this, but this is a feature built into that card given the HSF on that is really good.