Looking for fix to ATI drivers that cause BSOD with radeon 6870

Owner of a xfx radeon 6870 since June 2011, no problems what so ever till 2 days ago. Booted into windows normally and noticed my daul screens were displaying funny, rebooted the computer and got a BSOD.

Noticed BSOD message said something about a time out failure with my display driver. Booted into safe mode, used Drive Sweeper software to clean it out, reinstalled current Amd catalyst drivers. Rebooted again into safe mode, after windows logo would only proceed to show a black screen with a cursor, or straight BSOD on normal boot up. With the black screen with cursor, tried shift 5 times, showed the option for Control+alt+shift but it failed to bring up task manager.

F8 for advanced boot options and did a system restore to my earliest point, went into safe mode and device manager, set display driver to vga as the 6800 series driver wasn't registering. Can now boot windows 7 normally but without any Ati drivers... Noticed others were having this problem as well though a few solutions didn't pan out for me such as reinstalling the drivers. Never had this issue before, not sure if the card is bad? drivers? or something else?

Any input appreciated!

Found out the problem which is the card being defective. Installed an old 1650 with drivers and works fine with no functional issues. The 6870 displayed slightly noticeable horizontal red lines and when booting the BIOS logo half the screen appeared somewhat pixelated. Doing an RMA since the card is barely a year old, hope this helps anyone else down the line with a similar issue.