The cooling fan on my video card is going fast. I currently have a ECS NGT520C-1GQK-F GeForce GT 520 (Fermi) 1GB 64-Bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card. It's served me well. What things should I look for in the new card? I use the computer a lot for poser and also luxrenderer.

Also what damage am I doing to the rest of my computer if I keep using this one as is, until I get a new one?

Hi there I would recommend to re-apply with good thermal paste,if you want to use yours existing card for time being,I've used on my GTX580Ti Shin-Etsu X23-7783D and with this paste my temperatures drops to low 60's during the V-RAY or any other GPU based rendering,with stock paste my temps has been high as 90C and seen too 100C,which has pointed out,my paste has been pretty old,but I've bought this card I think 2 years ago...

If you are rendering lots in Luxrender or any other OpenCL renderer then I would go with ATI/AMD R9 280X or 290X,those cards are unbeatable in OpenCL,although new GTX970 or GTX980 are bit better but they cost two or three times more than R9-2XX,I've seen R9-290X for £140 few days ago which I bought straight away,but usual price for them is around £200-£250(in US I've seen them for around 250USD),R9-280X is cheaper and is equipped with 3GB VRAM which should be enough,but for my needs I need 4GB VRAM although would go rather with 8GB R9-290X,but they cost around 350-450GBP

But as above if you are using yours card in GPU based SW then I would go with biggest VRAM as you can,but this depends on more factors,how big scene are yours etc,in most cases 4GB VRAM is enough and sometimes 3GB is enough too

Hope this helps

Thanks,Jura