Alright.
By "newest" ForceWare, I meant off of nvidia's website. DirectX was off of Microsoft's website. If you know of a better place for either of those things, let me know, by all means.
Forceware was a clean install, too. I formatted my hard drive, installed Windows, installed drivers. There were no updates, it was the freshest batch from the beginning.
The motherboard is an ASUS P4S8X. I'll take a look at my BIOS settings, though I can't recall anything off hand that could be affecting my machine like it is.
Tonight, however, I think I'm going to put the card to the test in some actual games.