I think it could be two things:
  My MSI Z77Z-GD80 has 3/7 slots which only see my cards as 'Standard VGA Adaptors' - I've tested the mobo on 2 PSUs, and multiple GPUs which can hash as a single for 10-20m without crashing.  These slots worked previously.  Also, I reset the bios, and tried the "B" bios on this motherboard and the exact same thing.
          Current plan for tomorrow:  check drivers are current to be thorough.  Otherwise I'm considering calling MSI...
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  My GPU bios' might be corrupted?  I'm thinking this because I wiped my OS on rig#2 (all PCIe slots work, no fishy business with core system) now that I had free time today.  After hooking up my GPUs which hashed fine for ~10-12m at stock, I let 2 of them hash away and after ~2 hours one crashed.  Reset drivers, and other card crashed after similar amount of time.

For the MSI system - I also reinstalled win7 today (I had a lot of background time) to ensure I had clean 13.1 drivers, and swapped PSUs -> same problem as before with 3/7 slots, and even on the 'good' slots GPUs crash after a while. 

The strange thing is that if the GPU bios' are corrupted, it happened to all cards on both systems nearly simultaneously.  They both were running through a surge protector but I'm at a loss as the initial cause unless these particular cards (sapphire 7950 vapor-x) are vulnerable when underclocked to bios corruption.

I'm kind of running with the noob assumptions of GPU bios so I could be waaayyy off.

Mobo:  MSI Z77A-GD80
PSU:   Rosewill LIGHTNING-1300
PSU2:  Kingwin 850 (one i just pulled out today)


Thanks again for all your help it's extremely appreciated!