Diamond 6950 2gb Crashes in any 3d environment

[MagicBackPack]

About a month or so ago my graphics card started crashing in a few games after intermittent amounts of time, mostly it was games like bf bc2, metro 2033, and a few other dx11 style games. I figured it was just something with the drivers and did a clean sweep/reinstall of drivers and for a week or so it seemed to work, after that it wasn't just in those games, but every game I owned. what's more is now all but tf2 crashes on start up and tf2 crashes after maybe 60 seconds or so whereas originally it wouldn't happen for 15-20 minutes the times getting shorter and shorter. the crash causes my screen to go black, then reports that there is no signal, after about 5 seconds the sound that had been continuing in the backround goes in that quarter second loop that we all know and love to attribute to a crash at which point I have to manually reboot no matter how long I let it sit.

Things I have tried:

Tweaking just about every setting in the CCC down and up (within 50 mhz of stock settings no more than that, both up and down) including clock rate and max power (up and down 5-10 percent no more than ten and everywhere in between trying to find a "sweet spot")

Clean driver wipe/reinstall, including rollbacks to earlier known working drivers (most notably drivers from 6 months ago when I first bought my card that ran swimmingly when I purchased it)

Clean reinstall of windows from the ground up (windows 7 ultimate 64 bit edition)

Memory/cpu tests and benchmarks with no issues

so honestly I'm stumped, the only thing I could think is perhaps power starvation but I doubt it since it requires a 450 watt and I'm running a 550 that's been in my system since I had my older 4890 in it, and I figure it woulda showed some other signs before 6 months. either that or perhaps the memory on my video card is going bad or something along those lines. seeing as video and normal operating haven't had any problems I believe it to be the latter since it's only 3d applications, I just figured I'd get your guyses take and tips on any solutions to be found before I exchanged it for a new one

I can post my system specs and any other relevant information you may need if you think of something, thanks

 

[Tamz_msc]

You've tried most of the things that should be done, so I guess its time for RMA.

 

[MagicBackPack]

Found a fix for it, glaringly obvious and frustrating and completely overlooked. it's a well known fact that the 2gb 6950's are 6970's just dumbed down with the dipswitch to open up the locked shaders with the dual bios option. flicking that switch to it's original position (I must have accidentally switched it sometime when I was moving it to a lan party or something) has fixed the crashes and now it runs swimmingly in all of my games. my friend who picked up a sapphire 6950 pointed out that the switch was in the wrong position, changing it then booting up fixed all issues. my guess is that since I hadn't flashed the bios to the 6970 caused it to crash due to it having the ability to access those previously locked shaders. so if you have a 6950 going batshit crazy try changing the switch position (while it's off obviously) then see how it fairs, hopefully this will help out someone else who's having alot of the same issues I had