Radeon X1900 XT: Too Hot for the Mac Pro?

One of our readers has brought a problem to our attention that affects some Mac Pros equipped with a Radeon X1900 XT. After couple of months of intensive 3D use, the cooling system installed on the Radeon X1900 XT loses efficiency, the card then overheats and the user sees video artifacts and even complete freezes of the system.
The problem seems to have been identified and to fix it, the user can change the orientation of one of the Mac Pro fans to make it blow towards the GPU. You can also speed up the PCI stage fan with smcFancControl to fix the problem.
Several reports have been published on Macrumors forum, World Of Warcraft forum as well as on Apple discussion forum.
If Apple finally acknowledges the problem, we may expect to have a firmware update released soon, which may then give us access to a Mac OS X native GPU firmware flashing utility.
JCJ