Excessive GPU heat

When I bought my VGA card back in April I decided to go with a specially cooled model of the evga ACS³ series. Because this series contains a special heatsink design, it can cope with higher GPU and VRAM clockings. The 8800GTX KO I bought contains a GPU clocked at 625MHz instead of 575MHz while the DDR3 memory is clocked at a juicy 2GHz instead of 1.35Ghz.

Now that it has been loyally pleasuring my visual needs up until now I started experiencing unexplainable crashes, especially while playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which is even more weird since Crysis was running smoothly. I basically tried everything: I installed XP, lowered the resolution and texture size, removed the game mods, installed all kinds of stable and beta drivers - all caused the game to freeze after 5 to 10 minutes followed by a BSOD after another 2 minutes which just told me that the graphics card was the root of it. I installed the same game on the PC of my girlfriend which happens to have almost the same VGA card (8800 GTS) and the same mainboard. Of course there it worked like a charm.
I finally found out that the card was massively overheating both while idling and under load (85C and 98C respectively) which is way too high, considering that I cleaned the dust off the fan regularly. Setting the fan manually to 100% didn't help but at least using an 18W/220V industrial fan remedied the situation but was unbearable noise-wise.

Frustrated and already sad about having to send it to RMA I carefully unscrewed the covering metal case of the board in a desperate move. What joyful sight that resulted in: The heatspreader was basically blocked by a wall of dust, making it impossible for the fan to send any air through that part:

Now everything's back to normal - except that my newly ordered mainboard turned out to be defective and waits to get replaced. No meddling with hardware until Christmas is over, sniff.

Espain

Spain is a country like any other, it has its history and culture, its nice and its ugly spots - and its language. While languages in Europe usually have a lot in common, be it grammar or vocabulary wise, they definitely also have their little problems of alphabet incompatibility to each other.

For example most nations excluding English speaking ones (and maybe the Netherlands) tend to have their problems with the English 'th' and especially the 'r'. The French for all I know might from time to time find it difficult to properly pronounce words starting with or including an 'h' which makes 'Hotel' sound like 'Otel'.
This phenomenon is obviously based on the fact that the mother tongue doesn't contain or doesn't pronounce some bits and pieces of the other language and thus makes it difficult to master them. As many European nations have problems like this, people often just smile when they encounter them, knowing that oneself might sounds equally funny.

As I've got reasons to be in Spain quite regularly, I could explore the nation's culture, lifestyle and language mostly from a non-touristic point of view. This yielded many interesting facts. Like the French, they've got their problem with the 'h' but even more noticeable is one habit which I haven't encountered anywhere yet. This time the source is not unpronounced or non-existent letters in the speaker's native language but the enforcement to add letters where they don't belong.
The letter in question is the 'e' which, for a Spanish speaker, must be prefixed to double consonants like 'sp', 'st' or 'sm'. The first serious encounter I've enjoyed was a cinema advertising the movie 'Espiderman' followed by the famous alcoholic drink 'Esmirnoff'. I've met Spanish persons who, even by trying hard, couldn't possibly emit such words without leaking an 'e' first.
Well, I've just accepted that my sir name doesn't sound like 'Schmidt' but rather like 'Esmit' - which is totally acceptable considering the excessive use of consonants in this name.

Finally, another amusing finding:


As a side note, there are non-European languages which yield a similar behavior. An example is the Japanese way of appending vowels to consonants in foreign words, such that words ending in 'l' or 'r' actually would end in 'ru'. But that's mainly because the alphabet only contains syllables except for the 'n'.