Since this community is full of both mac enthusiasts and gamers, I thought I’d throw this little bit of information I discovered out there…
Recently I had the unpleasant experience of my Radeon X1900 equipped mac pro having random crashes while running 3d-intensive software and games. The video would cut out suddenly and crash the machine, and then it would stall while restarting and just sit there with no video and the internal fan blazing at max speed. This would clear up if I let it sit a few minutes. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that it was the video card overheating, and I read similar sounding reports from other users online who were also running with an X1900. I decided to pop my card out and check for dust buildup.
The insides of the computer were somewhat dusty, but nothing outrageous… except for the air intake on the fan assembly on top of the video card. It was literally caked in dust so thick that no air could travel through it - honestly its a miracle it could function at all. We’re talking a couple millimeters of densely packed debris that had been suctioned into place. The relative lack of dust elsewhere leads me to believe that the design of this card is flawed and is prone to trapping dust in the fan system. Honestly, if you piled up all of the dust on every other component, it would be about the same as the sheer mass that was plastered against the fan’s intake.
Needless to say, no crashes since the cleaning, and it actually runs incredibly quiet again (the fan is barely audible now, rather than grinding away helplessly at all times). This buildup was over the course of less than a year, so if you have one of these cards keep an eye on it.