Blown up video card
Since I decided to use XMMS as my alarm clock, I've put a lot of pressure on the stability of my workstation. There are no big problems here since I'm using Debian GNU/Linux. Note that some features are missing from the XMMS alarm plug-in like snooze and and stuff like that. But back to the story, I was in my bed, fully awake, with the sun flowing from behind my curtains.
No possible doubt, my trusty system did not wake me up. What a shame, it was not a power failure or a bad setting from me, it was crashed. It went back up without problems but only to crash a few hours latter with big ugly vertical stripes on the monitor. When I rebooted it, the stripes were still there at the BIOS prompt. Easy diagnostic: dead video card. My system is back on track with a crappy PCI card from the emergency spare parts bin.
Gauging by the smell of the card, it is roasted. Even if spare fans were available that would not save it. Why is that so? Why can't a 400$ card come with a decent ball bearing fan? I have the fan on my 200MHz still running, event with all the lint tightly packed in the heat sink. I have six years old 5$ case fans still running. When the heat sink on the CPU got clogged by lint, the system crashed but the core did not melt. Thats my second roasted video card with that six years old system.
Thats what you get with a "gamer" card: crap. They make it cheap because they expect you to move to a bigger card as soon as you can. Next time I'll get a 50$ card with open specs and free software drivers for GNU/Linux. I'll get one without a heat sink, one not designed to melt as soon as the warranty is over.