It's an XFX double d radeon HD 7970. After a bit more research and some trial and error I discovered the wonderful world of firmware based gpu throttling. As soon as the temp even hit 80 degrees it slashed the clock speed in half before even touching the fan speed to try and reduce the temp. I poked around with a few tools and am currently using Trixx's fan control on a curve to have it "properly" increase the fan speed as the temp increases and it's steady at the border of 76 and 77 degrees and hasn't been dropping. I need to do a few more tweaks on the clock setting(it's currently overclocked) as it will occasionally lock up when I'm trying to do mining and another task at the same time. Running just mining it's fine at the current clock settings, but this is my main machine so I'll have to sacrifice some speed for stability. Running at factory speeds I can mine and do other minor gpu tasks and have no issues so I should be able to find a sweet spot after some tuning.

I have a couple other linux boxes running various models of ati gpus at maxx'd settings that haven't been having issues so this one's no biggie. Thanks for the pointers though.

I've been trying about 7 different mining clients and all of them have heavy fluxations on the MHash rate, is there a way I can stabilize this?