I've had a pair of high-end (at the time) nVidia cards. One of which decided to de-solder the capacitors off itself. I sent it back to the distributor with clear instructions as to what was broken, they just sent it back to me after a few days, in exactly the same condition as it was when I sent it. It still works perfectly, however. When I upgrade, I suspect I'll go with a 4870 or 4890 depending on cost.
If you want a really low-cost machine for torrents, I run an Intel Atom NAS and windows server. It works amazingly for the price (£225 for a 1tb machine, 2gb ram, quiet case, dual-core 1.6ghz). With a copy of server 2003, it performs very well indeed.