Hey all, here's a scenario that I haven't been able to figure out.

It's been doing this for as long as I can remember, at least as far back to when I built this computer in late 2009.

I have an EVGA GTX275 SC, which originally would crash and lock into low performance mode once it reached a certain temperature, regardless of fan speed and such. I RMA'd this card and they sent me a replacement, which eliminated the black screen/low-performance mode crashes. However now, if I am using EVGA precision, at random the computer will just crash and reboot. No BSOD, just a random reboot. I thought perhaps it was something else, as this system has a lot of stuff slapped in it (4 HDD's in 2 RAID arrays, etc). I don't overclock, because it doesn't make much of a difference and I'd rather not just make more heat for no gain. But I do use precision to adjust fan speeds, since noise doesn't bother me. This card WILL get hot, the hottest I've seen is 92C - without adjusting the fan speed.
 
But it doesn't seem to care about temperature, it just keeps on truckin' just fine. But, if I use precision - even if I'm not gaming, and just sitting at the desktop, at random the whole system will crash. If I don't have EVGA precision open, everything is fine. Upon reboot, Windows says it has recovered from an unknown problem.

Here's an interesting kicker to the situation - once it crashes and reboots, I am unable to change fan speed or clocks, or anything. I can still move the sliders and set the speed of the fan, BUT, the fan speed is locked at 39% regardless of setting - even though Precision reports that the fan speed is in fact at whatever I set it to. The only way to regain control of fan speed settings, is to power off the computer, let it sit for a few minutes, and reboot. Then everything works fine until the next crash. If it simply reboots, I have no control over fan speed. Using MSI Afterburner gives the same results. Same issue, no control over fan speed. Now generally, the fan is set to 40% automatically, but when this problem happens - it's locked at 39% instead of 40%. Everest also reports 39%, as does precision and afterburner.
 
 
Has anybody else ever experienced this before? I can simply open evga precision, without touching a thing - and it will do this. I've used old versions, the newest version, it even happened after my last full wipe and reload of Windows. It's done this with any driver version, including beta drivers. For curiosities sake, I tried to produce the problem after a fresh install of windows without an nVidia driver, and precision was the first program I installed - it still caused the random crash.  I'm pretty confident it's a hardware issue, but it doesn't explain as to why precision causes this to happen.

Any thoughts?
Here's my system config:
Win7 x64
Asus Crosshair III with latest BIOS
AMD 955BE @ 3.8 (crashes happen regardless of CPU overclock)
8GB DDR3 (I tried all sorts of over and under-clocked timings... no change with this crash).
850W PSU (Antec CPX)

As I said before, even without an nVidia driver installed, the problem can be reproduced by installing and opening Precision and enjoying the waiting game.
 
Thanks in advance,
Steve