Two different cards from two different manufacturers under performing. What is the actual issue?

I recently purchased a PNY GTX 770. After installing it I started running some benchmarks. Everything was performing much worse than I had anticipated. At 1080p with max settings and 2x AA, Hitman Absolution only got 30fps. Far Cry 3 was getting ~40. Max Payne 3 ~40-50, and I only got 900 in Unigine Heaven 4.0 on ultra with extreme tessellation and 8x aa when I probably should have been around ~1100 or so.

I returned the card, thinking I had received a dud, and went ahead and purchased an EVGA SC ACX 780 because it wasn't that much more expensive, and, what the hell, I'm trying to max everything for a while so let's go with a 780.

Well, I put the 780 in and run the same tests. Hitman Absolution still only gets 30fps and I even turned off AA completely. Far Cry 3 only gets around 50 fps. Max Payne 3 averages around 60, but it dips to the low 40's or even the upper 30's occasionally. Unigine Heaven gets a score around 1330. This is all with gpu boost 2.0, so without that I'd likely be doing even worse.

What is going on?! The card stays extremely cool, never getting above 60 degrees Celsius, and it's pulling full power. My processor and psu should be enough not to cripple these cards like this. The only thing I can think of is that I might need to update my bios, but since there's a risk involved with that I wanted to get some opinions from other users before I go that route.

Please help me out here guys. Thank you.

System: i5 3470 asrock h77 pro4/mvp evga gtx780 corsair vengeance 8gb seagate barracuda 500gb xfx pro 550w 80+ bronze

 

Drivers?