GTX 970 artifacting & crashing, appears to be DOA.

Hi,

I purchased a new graphics card - a Gigabyte GTX 970 - from Scan on November 17th. It arrived on November 19th, and I opened it up on Monday 24th. I think it's DOA - I have had some severe artifacting issues and the card has crashed multiple times for seemingly no reason whatsoever.

Here are some pics of the artifacts.

http://i.imgur.com/BTaOkOO.png
http://i.imgur.com/EfJZeZm.png
http://i.imgur.com/qM6fdJc.png

I am pretty upset that this has happened. Was very excited to have a new GPU and it's straight up failing me right out of the gate.

I suppose this would be worthy of an RMA. What should my next steps be (e.g. recording the issue so I have proof of it happening or something) in order to ensure that I'm successful? A friend of mine has relayed a horror story of his to me - he sent in a DOA card he got and his RMA was declined three times (thankfully not with Scan) before he was actually sent a new card. I can't afford for this to happen as I simply don't have the time or money!

Any advice would be very much welcomed.