Ok so I decided if I'm gonna figure this out, I need to sacrifice a nights sleep. I took a 2 hour nap and have been playing with afterburner, kombuster, and occt for the past 4 hours.
I ran kombuster while asleep at all stock (factory overclock) no crashes and no artifacts upon my return. So I played with overclocking to see if GPU is really my issue. I had set fan control up so that temps hovered around 65Celsius to ensure that the card was being stressed at higher than real world use as I have never seen my card get hotter than 55 Celsius. I had no artifacts upwards of 850mhz/1900mhz GPU/memClock. So I downloaded occt to run test with error checking enabled. With GPU core at 725mhz I tried to find memClock ceiling. I got it up to 2000mhz (1800mhz stock) when I figured "that's high enough". Then I pushed GPU core up to 875 before needing voltage increase. Bumped voltage up from 950 to 975 and occt didn't throw any errors. Brought gpu core up to 900mhz, occt showed errors. So I bumped voltage up to 1000 and tried again. Within seconds occt threw over 100 errors, I quickly quit the test. At this point I tried something new, I reset gpu to default factory oc settings and upped the voltage to max allowed in afterburner (1087 iirc) ran occt and to my surprise was immediately met with over 1000 errors. Quickly quit the test and while resetting afterburner to stock settings my graphics driver crashed, albeit with successful recovery by Windows.
What does this all mean?
My deduction is that the graphics card is indeed dying or that it's not getting the power it is asking for. If the latter, then my psu must be either inadequate or failing correct? I don't think it would be inadequate as its a corsair 650w single rail. It is powering my AMD x2 555 with a slight voltage bump, running at 4ghz. My WD black 640gb hdd, an optical drive, external 500 gb WD passport, and the gpu. I really don't think all that would tax a quality 650w PSU. So should I look into a failing psu? I will edit this post soon with hwmonitor's voltage readings but they have never raised any red flags that I've noticed, and corsair is one of the most reputable psu makers out there.
Thanks again for all your help.
Edit:
HWMonitor Voltage ranges:
CPU vcore: 1.472 - 1.488
VIN1: 1.616 - 1.616
+3.3V: 3.360 - 3.360
+5V: 5.027 - 5.053
+12V: 12.160 - 12.224
-12V: -12.800 - -9.664
+5V VCCH: 3.629 - 3.629
VBAT: 3.280 - 3.280
CPU: 1.472 - 1.488
Nvidia VIN0: 0.950 - 0.950