The last two times the artifacts happened, all settings on the graphics card were set to default. Also, I purchased 3dmark11 advanced today and ran numerous tests on default settings in extreme mode. If it had bad vram im pretty sure it would have showed up there. Tests went smooth with no errors. I overclocked the card temporarily for the test to 900mhz/1.187v on the gpu and 1100 on the memory to see what this bad boy would do and got a score of X3026 with no errors or issues, but other than that one time for the test, I have been keeping the card at default settings. Im thinking my next step is to force the memory to stay at 1000mhz at all times instead of letting ccc automatically ramp the memory down to 300 at idle.