Very strange experience with radeon 4890

[leumasshake]

I just had one of the strangest experiences I'v ever had with a computer. I have a rig that is about 2 years old now with a Radeon 4890 and an i7 920. Its an MSI oced card that runs at 880 stock speeds, but I ran it for a long time at 950, occasionally as high as 980, with out any problems. At 980 it peaked around 83C with kombustor running for about an hour. At 950 it never even reached 80C. I left home for a few days and my brother was using my computer for a bit, playing borderlands. He said it BSODed on him out of nowhere and when it restarted there were funny lines and colors over all the POST and boot screens and it would BSOD during the windows loading screen. I started messing with it tonight and it did exactly what he had described. I dual boot windows 7 and xp. 7 would BSOD at the windows logo, but xp would boot and as soon as the windows loading screen finished the monitor switched off but I could hear the desktop loading sound. I eventually got it to boot into safe mode in 7 and there were still lines over the desktop there. I was ready to admit that the card had somehow killed itself. Then I rebooted it one more time and noticed the lines and distortion were gone. I let it go and it booted all the way into windows without a problem. It seems to be completely back to normal now. Has anyone here seen a card come back to life like this before? Not sure how comfortable I am with a zombie GPU in there, haha.

 

[leumasshake]

So I posted this the other day mainly because I was curious if anyone else had seen something like this happen before. But now it has happened 2 more times so its become a real problem. It has now crashed in Borderlands and Call of Duty 4 and luckily the safe mode trick has recovered it both times. The card is still not getting too hot, it was at about 67C when it crashed the last time. I have no idea what could be causing this. I was running somewhat dated drivers (Catalyst 10.11) and I've now updated to 11.6 but during the install it gives little error messages then continues, and it seems to be working. I can't get it to go through a complete install without an error popping up somewhere but its a different place each time so its hard to isolate the problem.

System Specs
Dual boot Windows 7 x64 and XP
MSI X58 Pro-E
i7 920 @ 160*21 3.3ghz
6gb DDR3
MSI R4890-T2D1GOC
730W PSU

I realize this is a lot of reading but I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me here.

 

[leumasshake]

One more update. I can no longer boot into windows normally, only in safe mode. The first time this happened I ran the kombustor stress test for an hour and a half or so and it had no issues at all. I decided to try it again after two more crashes and it immediately showed red lines in the image froze and bsod a few seconds later. I have not been able to get back into windows since. How does a graphics card just die all of a sudden after never having any problems? Someone please help me.