Half a year ago, I started having issues with my PC. The screen started to freeze frequently, all pointing to that the video card was overheating. Eventually the card was in such bad shape that I had to replace it. Since I've had the PC for quite some time, I didn't grant it too much thought.
I then bought the card again (which by the way is a Ati Sapphire 9800Pro) to replace the old. The first days it worked as it should, but then the former freezes started to reoccur. I finally noticed that the fan of the card had given up. I expect that this also interfered with the old card.
What could have caused this to happen? I couldn't find anything negative mentioned about the card's fan while informing myself about it. I'm going to replace the fan so I would appreciate if anyone here could advice to a more resistant fan with a greater longevity.

Thanks in advance,
Sebastian Cassten

This can happen if your case insides are too dusty, causing dust to accumulate on the card and jam the fan, in which case you'd have to clean it out with a can of compressed air. Another cause would be the case itself not being ventilated properly, thus causing the internal ambient temperature to rise.

replacing video card heatsinks are generally slightly more technical than replacing CPU heatsinks. But it wouldn't be too hard to learn...

Either way, try other things first, like cleaning it out, and putting some more fans, especially if changing heatsinks is a new concept.