HD 6970 Anomalies

So I bought an open-box HD 6970 and I see these weird, fluctuating pixels that make things look dirty in some games such as BF3 & CIV5, but not in all games. The bad pixels are most obvious against white backgrounds but seem to occasionally be on all textures. At other times it seems to only be on distant textures, e.g., the sky.

The bad pixels fluctuate even when stationary in-game, and occur with both VGA and HDMI cords on different monitors. I'm pretty sure it's the card. The fan also sometimes makes an annoying, quick clicking sound but my temperatures seem to be what I believe to be normal, around 84c when gaming.

I'm using an ASUS P6X58D Premium motherboard. I don't see these weird pixels when using my old GeForce 9800 GTX+ in the same PCI-E slot. I am worried I got a card someone overclocked too far and damaged some of the memory chips or something?

I tried underclocking the card and still saw anomalies. Turned up the fan speed to keep the card cooler and they were still there. I've uninstalled and reinstalled drivers. They won't go away.

Here's a big screenshot because they start to look different at lower resolutions (most visible on the white areas):


*Edit: I suppose photobucket reduced the resolution, but you can still see the splotchy areas. Just know they look like little pixels dancing around when in game. Maybe a video would help?

Any ideas on what these might be would be greatly appreciated.

just a few questions
what are the frequencies
is it overclocked
what model of card
have you tried stress software
furmark
occt
msi