I purchased my EVGA GTX 970 on March 19th, 2016. It has officially burned out as of Thursday. That's the fastest I've ever had a GPU card fail on me. I'm thinking the replacement will get a standalone water cooling unit added to it...

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Wow. Were you overclocking/overvolting this card? I've never had a GPU die on me, even running GPUGrid on it 24/7 for years.

I also have never had a GPU burn out. I'd be very curious to know if you were pushing the voltage beyond what it shipped with.

Never had a GPU die like that but did watch an Asus motherboard burn (fire and smoke, alarms going off). Looked like that afterwards. Of course the warranty had just expired.

CJ, I suggest you return the GPU to the retailer or RTM it.

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CJ in Seattle - I am really curious under which conditions this GPU was operating.
Overclocking? Overvolting? Overheating for some other reason (insufficient case ventilation, ...?)

Please let us know some more details.

Try to contact Evga and get it replaced as it is under guarantee.

Watercooler should cover all components on the card, GPU, VRMs, mosfets, capasitors etc... Otherwise the same can happen.

Ran it completely stock settings. I don't OC, because I like stuff to run forever whenever possible and there's too little gain (and then this kind of thing). So I'm assuming if there was any OC it was the default, which I've had other cards in the past (put my "old" 660TI back in and it's still crunches fine) that had OC like my 660 built in and they never had any problems. I don't OC anything unless it's built in and I use the most basic of levels that they come with. I already have my RMA number from EVGA and will be getting a replacement once I ship it to them. I killed an 850W PSU once because of crunching with 3 graphics cards and I got a warranty replacement on that one too. I was just really surprised by this because the card typically sat at 70°C, while others before sat at 80°C. Any recommendations for water cooler blocks or should I just look at the 1070 as a replacement and sell the warranty replacement?

Oh, and I'm running:
ASUS X99 TUF Sabertooth
I7 5930K
32GB Corsair Vengence DDR4 2666 I think?
Corsair Graphite T760 case
EVGA 850W PSU

I should also note that this particular version of the EVGA GTX970 is the one that only Best Buy carries. I'm not sure if that should affect the thermal capabilities of the card or not but just in case I thought I'd throw it out there.

You may just have been unlucky. The GPU may simply have arrived with you already damaged to the extent that it was inevitably going to fail.

Burnouts like that can occur for many reasons. Given what you've already said the possibilities (assuming it wasn't already damaged/going to fail in that time) include:
Some minor and unnoticed damage occurred during the installation with failure taking some time.
Something fell onto the back of the GPU, or hit it causing minor physical damage (a cable) [assuming it had no backplate].
A cable, fluff, insect caused localised overheating (apparently to resistors) or short circuited them.
Voltage or amps problem with the motherboard or PSU.

However, these things are unlikely (unless you were working at it). Warping of the board, solder flaws (furring)/bad etching, bad components would take some time before failing.

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Judging by the place of the burn marks, I would say it was caused by the monitor. Do you use a TV as a monitor? Or a monitor as a TV? Is there any set top box, satellite or cable TV receiver connected to your monitor?

No, just an Acer 27" monitor. Nothing special. I think it's just a cheaper design, since these are sold specifically to Best Buy. I'm hoping they'll send me a better model for a replacement. If they send me another of the same one then I'll simply wait and see if it burns out as well. I may disable any stock overclock it has, but that remains to be seen.

I was really lazy about shipping this card in. Got my RMA installed day before yesterday. Going to be looking over the OC settings and maybe try getting my hands on a surface thermometer and see what that spot is hitting in temps. If this one burns out the same way, I'm still covered under warranty and then, with any luck, if they're out of that card maybe they'll give me a GTX 1070 or something. I'm not really one for getting my cards this way, but it shouldn't burn out like that either. If it was a badly designed card and can't run for at least the full year, then I'm better off with a different model anyway. Let's see how it goes. Gotta get my crunching rolling again. :)