Comment 9 for bug 570589

I definitely agree with Richard - I'd also rate this bug highly important, especially with the fact in mind that for ATI cards the xserver-xorg-video-ati driver is used by default on a fresh installation (correct me if I am wrong here). Also consider this might perhaps lead to increasing reports about dying video cards and eventually to bad publicity for the entire distribution. I might be a bit too concerned here, but I wonder how long a card may actually survive when permanently running on temperatures around 80°C (when idle, that is).

Due to fglrx not supporting KMS and introducing a severe memory leak with compositing enabled, I switched back to the free driver just yesterday, but chose to revert that, as I am heavily concerned about the lifetime of my video card (HD4350, passive / heatsink) when using the free driver with the temperature being significantly (!) higher.