Radeon X1900XTX Overheating?

I was playing Quake 4 today, and I began to experience artifacts after about 10 minutes of gaming. Large polygons, all with different solid colors, would appear randomly all over the screen, and flicker or go away whenever I moved. In addition, the hud polygons would flicker as well.

My first conclusion is that the card is overheating. This has not happened before in any game. It just started today. I have not done any overclocking, and I am using the stock cooler on the card.

I decided to check the temperature of the card, so I set it to log the temperature over a 1 hour period of gaming.

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y193/Lloyd1337-2/overheating.jpg

In it's idle state(in Windows, before I loaded the game), it was around 64°C. When I loaded the game, it went up to around 70°C to 80°C. About 10 minutes in, I began experiencing the artifacts again. At this point, the card was running in excess of 90°C, and at one point even reached 94°C. Is this normal for the X1900XTX, or is the card overheating?

While playing FEAR, the card was around 82°C, although I did not do an extensive test as I have not experienced any artifacts in FEAR.

Does it sound like my card is overheating, or could there be some other problem that is causing this? If it is overheating, what should I do to fix it if it continues? Is there any chance the card could be damaged, and am I damaging it more by running it while it is at such high temperatures? Or is it normal for this card to reach 94°C, and maybe I'm just overreacting.

 

It happened again today. The temperature recorded with a maximum of 96°C.

Does anyone have anything to say about this? Or maybe it should be moved to the Games or Cooling section? Didn't know where to post it.

 

Now that I'm done with Quake 4, I've moved on to Half-Life 2 Episode 1. The game keeps crashing when my video card starts to heat up.

So, does anyone have ANY suggestions as to what I should do to keep my card cool? And does anyone else have this card, or a similar card, and can tell me what temperatures they get while idle/gaming?

 

I did a little test with the fan speed today.

I ran a benchmark using the normal fan settings. The maximum temperature recorded at 88.5°C, and the fan speed was only at 36.36%.

I then forced the fan speed to 100% and ran the same test again. The maximum temperature was only 68.25°C. Thats 20°C(!!) cooler!

When idle, the average temperature was 68°C and fan speed was 31.82%. With the fan speed at 100%, the idle temperature was only 52°C!

However, I am a bit concerned about running the fan at 100% all the time. It makes a very loud screaming noise, and I don't want to damage the fan motor or something by pushing it too much.

 

you could always just trying to add another, or larger fan on your case to help the overall temp.... that could help.... ive also seen heat sinks you can put on video cards.... i'd go with trying to make your case's air flow better.... and if theres dust in there get rid of that asap!