Problems with Radeon R7-265 (MSI make) and recent drivers

[such_science_wow]

I recently built a new desktop with a MSI Radeon R7-265 GPU. Everything was working fine for the first few days, until suddenly the graphics drivers gave out. Under medium load (playing a game, but nothing intense, and all temperatures <55C), the GPU froze up after about 1 hour. On restart, the machine starts fine, but displays a bunch of red blotches on the screen (not dead pixels, more like 20x20 px red blotches), and intermittently flickers larger rectangles of noise in random areas of the screen. Also every minute or so the OS displays a "Display driver has crashed and recovered" error message.

Currently, I am blaming the drivers rather than the hardware because removing all the ATI drivers and leaving it in straight Microsoft Basic Display Adapter mode seems to fix everything. Also, the issues only appear at the Windows login screen - the BIOS screen is fine. However, even after doing a full driver removal (with driver sweeper, registry cleaning, etc), and reinstalling the latest graphics drivers from MSI (13.251 stable), the issue comes back.

Does this sound like I've somehow managed to bork my GPU? Or is it more likely a driver issue? I am not sure what diagnostics I could run beyond playing around with the drivers further.
I can return the card in the next week, so if it seems like its a hardware problem, I would rather do that.

OS: Windows 8.1
Build:
ASRock Z97 Extreme4 motherboard
Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz
MSI R7-265 2GD5-OC GPU
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM
Cooler Master 212 EVO CPU cooler
Corsair CX430M 430 Watt PSU
Crucial M500 Series 240GB SATA SSD
Seagate Barracuda 7200 1TB SATA

Nothing is overclocked (beyond factory overclocking on the GPU), so Im fairly sure I didn't screw up anything there.

Thank you for reading, and any advice you could give!

 

[Thelps]

It's very difficult to diagnose since it seems as if the GPU is broken yet you also have evidence (the BIOS screen looking fine) that it isn't broken.

If at all possible try to the card in a different machine, and try drivers direct from ATI rather than MSI's own drivers. Occasionally the GPU designer will release drivers faster than the manufacturer.

 

[Roberts Zeltins]

HI!
I have similar problem. Did you solve it?
Was the card defective of it was problem with drivers?
BR,
Roberts