Windows 7 - PNY XLR8 GTX 560 Ti random freezing behavior

Hello, Forum

I'm starting to believe that my worst nightmare became true... my 235$ graphics card *may* be defective

I got the card last Saturday.. installed it, fresh windows 7 install too, got my drivers, everything went fine until yesterday... i experienced the first freeze, the screen froze, the cursor was unrensponsive and then out of nowhere, everything was fine...

The weird thing is that i did test the video card with MSI Kombustor and went perfectly fine, played Skyrim (maxed out), SSFIV Arcade Edition (maxed out) and NFS: Shift 2 Unleashed (maxed out) just to test its power... everything went fine, in fact, after the first freeze, i google'd up and it seems that a lot of users had the same or at least a similar problem, so i updated to the latest beta drivers (290.53) availables and the problem got "solved" cause i played Skyrim for about 4hrs and it was fine...

Today i went to college, then i went to work, then i came home, and my little sister told me that the PC was "acting weird" so i checked and the random freezing problem was here again... this time was even weirder! the mouse pointers would change without reason, instead of the arrow, i'd get the hand, then i'd get the one that looks like this ---> I, and so on... so i tried to solve the issue on my own... updated the NVIDIA High Definition Audio (4 of those in Device Manager), configured the NVIDIA Control Panel (disabled the HDMI audio, enabled it again) and nothing seems to work, the freezes happen randomly.. i just had one that the screen turned black and the cursor became a big white square, at first i could move the big square around, but then the cursor stopped so i had to hard reset the PC.

I'm leaning (and wishing) towards a driver related issue, to be honest, i WANT it to be a driver issue because i'm not from U.S.A. and the sending the card back there is going to be more expensive than buying a new one... So, basically i can do whatever i want with the card, i was thinking of flashing the BIOS to adjust the fan settings (min 26%, max 79%), i modified the BIOS to be: min 50%, max 100%, but didn't flash it (too scare to do it) i mean, i worked 2 months to gather money for the card

Another thing, the video card is the only thing different in my PC, besides the case... every other hardware is perfectly stable and it has been my main PC for almost 2 months... the system was more than stable with my GT 440 so i guess the culprit is either the new GPU or the drivers..

Any hint or suggestions? would be really helpful...