HD 6870 Driver crashing-New PC

I recently purchased and put together a computer from newegg and everything is great except for the fact that the graphics card driver crashes and then windows 7 recovers from it like everytime I do something as simple as open internet explorer or any on screen window. I've tried uninstalling all the drivers and reinstalling just the 11-11 newest catalyst to no avail, I've tried a different monitor on either of the vga ports to no avail, I did a memory check with the microsoft memory check program and it's all fine, I did a scandisc and there were no errors, I doubt it's overheating since it happens while the pc is still cold after booting up, I updated windows 7 drivers and direct x. It's not program related since it happens while im just on the desktop using no programs. At this point the things I still need to try are to get into safe mode(not sure how to do this in windows 7) and uninstall, reinstall the driver, and also try a different video card in the pc, luckily i have an older nvidia 7800gt i can slap in to test the pci-slot. Any other suggestions are much appreciated!

The stats:
-COOLER MASTER Storm Scout SGC-2000-KKN1-GP Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
-XFX HD-687A-ZDFC Radeon HD 6870 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card with Eyefinity
-OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
- OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular High Performance Power Supply compatible with Intel Sandybridge Core i3 i5 i7 and AMD Phenom
-LG CD/DVD Burner Black SATA Model GH22NS70 OEM - OEM
- ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
-G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR
-Microsoft Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit - OEM
-Intel Sandybridge Core i7 2600k processor