In case it helps anyone else, my problem seems to be with guiminer.

Switching to p2pool using cgminer I've not had any issues with GPU usage crashing to 0 or IO errors.  Manually upping fan to 80% also keeping gpu temp around 63. Noisy, but still trying to dial things in.

Still can't figure out how to run deepbit on cgminer to compare with guiminer hash rates. Will figure it out though.