mine came 2 days ago. Had 7 on it also in a sleeve and a seperate white cd sleeve with 64bit version.. My case was sealed but only with the plastic adhesive circle covering the pull out part.
Now that is funny, the EXACT same thing is happening with my x1900xtx also.
One day loaded a game, ran fine, switch to a different level and pc froze and rebooted, then started getting artifacting in bios screen on bootup and it would go into windows but then would crash just in windows after...
Welcome camp jumpers, you have made a smart move.
I too used to be an nvidiot (no offense). all nvidia all the time, until they released the abomination that was the 5k series geforce.
Went to ATI for my next 3 cards, and 2 years ago went nvidia again. now i am going back to ati, awesome...
Honestly i would do a windows reinstall.. Those numbers are WAY off...
I know i have had driver bloat cause really bad performance numbers before but this was when i went from nvidia to ati back from the ti4200 to ati- 9800 years ago and this was in windows XP.... vista/7 handle these things...