may seem strange: linux too much for hardware?
 

This may sound like a strange question, but is there a possibility that slackware might be too hard on my video hardware?

I have been running slackware on my main machine for the better part of an entire year... however, recently, I have become concerned as to problems with video hardware. Four months ago, I owned a PNY GeForce FX5700 VE with 256 MB of memory... lo and behold, the card ran so hot that the fan melted and the chip fried. Originally, I thought this was because that particular card was low end. However, I noticed yesterday that my four-month old ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB graphics card was running extremely hot (so hot that it could easily burn flesh). The fan was running on the heatsync and everything else seemed fine... this leaves me with the question: "is this a problem with agpgart, drivers, or possibly some sort of software overclocking?" In both instances, I used the proprietary drivers associated with the graphics card company.

I think this is an issue of case cooling/ventilation rather than a generic problem with the drivers and/or linux. I say this because I've never heard anyone else report this problem of overheating graphics cards nor have I experienced this myself.