Video card failures

  So, with yet another video card death, plus another post in the forums asking about I think possible ways to diagnose the card failure (which I have misplaced the link to), I'm wondering if anybody has ever done in-depth studies on causes of video card deaths and/or has suggestions for preventing them, or clever workarounds for not caring that don't involve alcohol.

  While idly googling I ran across the entertaining thought of simply chucking the dead card in the oven: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Temporarily+repair+a+lost-cause+graphics+card+by+heating+it+up+in+an+oven/2240 ; (warning, may lead to health problems and/or zombie cards).  I haven't tried this yet myself.  :-)

  I also learned that there are 3rd party cooling solutions for video cards as well (google "vga cooling") which surprisingly had escaped my notice entirely, despite the fact that I've done the same thing for my CPU sometimes.  Does anybody have any statistically significant experience with whether or not these or other cooling methods are really of much help, or know of other graphics card failure avoidance techniques?  I don't really know why I go through graphics cards so quickly compared to other components.  I should mention I'm not using Iray, plus I still have giant half-empty-space tower cases so I'm probably not really stressing the cards out much heat-wis, although I suppose the case could be arranged such that CPU heat is blowing on it, I'll check the next time I open either case.  I'm trying to find a brand I've never used before just for kicks, not that this means much if the cause isn't related to the manufacturing process or that process changes from one model to the next anyway.

  Funny graphics card failure relates stories are also encouraged to ease the pain of loss.