Strange gtx 970 problem

[qhgf]

I picked up a new EVGA gtx 970 FTW a few months ago, and just recently I have gotten around to squeezing the most that I can out of it. my rig is an x79 system with a 3930k which you may or may not know does not have official support for PCIe gen 3, even though the CPU does have the necessary throughput to run gen 3. so I went and enabled the pcie 3.0 x79 "hack" and got a small performance boost. still after though, I decided to flash my own BIOS with increased TDP hoping for higher clocks than before. Unfortunately I didn't make it too far because during a stress test, I had a driver crash in which it could not recover itself (this has happened quite a few times to me), when I reboot, my displayport connected monitor is not getting a signal, while all of my other three monitors are. 

 

after a few minutes, I get artifacts on my desktop that eventually cause my system to lock up and force a reboot again. long story short, using a spare GPU, I conclude that the gen 3 hack is causing the display errors, so I install a clean version of windows, and switch to a fresh BIOS on my 970 (the FTW has Triple BIOS). now I no longer get display errors.

 

however, my DisplayPort still is not functioning. whenever I go to activate my Displayport monitor I get the "The display settings could not be saved. Please try a different combination of display settings" message within windows.

 

I have also painted my ACX shroud using linus plasti-dip method  

 

Down to the question(s): 

 

1: what can I do for my DisplayPort or is it gone forever?

 

2: should I go for a RMA (I've heard EVGA is pretty tolerant on their RMAs)?