I have a similar FX5900 card in my old AMD Barton tower- currently running Lubuntu on it. I can't remember ever having artifacts on the thing, but the fan did die pretty early on in its lifetime. The OS would shut down when I had XP installed because the temps would nearly fry the card. I used to open the window in the middle of winter, yank the panel off the side, and stick my desktop facing outdoors to expose the card to cold air while I was waiting for the replacement fan to arrive in the mail. (In hindsight, this was an idiot idea due to possible moisture damage, but nothing broke. I was a dumb 20-something back then that worked for 12 hours+ at night.)
I ended up sandwiching the thing into a Monster-brand heatsink and fans combo, with dual heat pipes and a *crazy* loud turbo fan on the side of the card. I can't remember if it was BFGTech or not, but I used to buy their cards all of the time until they went bankrupt. The Monster fan alone is ridiculously loud, and the variable speed control on the back never worked right. When you push the "turbo" fan's button, it literally sounds like a tiny jet engine spinning up, or a small vacuum cleaner. It still runs to this day. I miss BFG products. My very last card of theirs was a 7800 AGP card that fried itself, some RAM, a hard drive, a PSU, and another motherboard. That was the death knell of my Graphite box. Fortunately, I had yanked my Voodoo 5 out of there prior to testing and ended up having to sell it.
"The height of strategy, is to attack your opponent’s strategy” -Sun Tzu
“Make your fighting stance, your everyday stance and make your everyday stance, your fighting stance.” - Musashi
SET BLASTER = A220 I5 D1 T3 P330 E620 OMG WTF BBQ