Hey Zig,
My buddy (xdak) and I both have the V5, he gets swimming gauges with FSAA enabled and I don't. We both get serious textures cracks with FSAA enabled. However, the card works fine with FSAA disabled.
As for the pauses or stuttering, we have seen it with every video card we've tried (V3, Elasa GTS2 and V5). It seems to be related to the monitor refresh rate and the natural speed of the CPU+Vid Card combo. Try turning off (or on) VSYNC. Try changing your monitor update rate. The stuttering almost disappears for me when I set my monitor refresh rate to 85Hz and enable VSYNC.
xmab