I ran into similar problems with my 4870 (XFX XXX). It ran fine with the stock cooler, but was too noisy,so I switched to a Scythe Musashi. The first app I tried was furmark, which ran for about 30 seconds then crashed. Needless to say, I went into full panic mode. The core temp was fine, but the VRMs were hitting about 140c before crashing (the card resets once they pass 126c). I posted on the Scythe forums and they told me that it's a known issue with Furmark - it disables dynamic voltage regulation, so VRM temps go through the roof.
I'm guessing you've run into the same issue.
I've switched over to copper mosfet coolers on the VRMs, but even so they hit 90c under the Clear Sky benchmark (normally they're around 75c under heavy load). I haven't tried Furmark since I installed them. I'm not sure how they're cooled on the reference 4850 cooler, but he 4870 cooler has a huge steel base, so presumably they benefit from a bigger surface area.
To be honest I'm less than impressed with ATI - the VRM issue is bad enough, but driver support in Vista x64 is pretty feeble too. Far Cry 2 stutters terribly in certain areas, for no apparant reason, Drakensang has similar problems, and they've not even managed to get hardware acceleartion for AVIVO sorted. Nvidia's definitely streets ahead in terms of x64 support... (Sadly my pcie 1.0a mobo isn't G92 friendly, or I'd have stuck with Nvidia).