So Nvidia cards are less resilient than AMD cards, mine is an amd and going strong for almost 2 years.
Seems the case - else OP is very unlucky. I've had six 270s running at 87-95*C for months without issue. Five more run at 86-92*C. Other eight chill out at 78*C or less because they're outside. (inside ones provide free house heat). A separate 5850 I saved from Bitcoin GPU days for general computing purposes has been heavily used and now hashes Scrypt like a champ. Once Summer rolls around, they'll all be hashing at around 95*C and enjoying that lovely outdoor humidity. I've never had a single GPU fail, including over a year of 16 5850s hashing SHA256 at fairly high temps. Seems about as common for a GPU to fail as a CPU anymore, which is to say it's extremely unusual (except for laptops, which generally have the cooling capacity of a PC put in a giant hole and covered with dense clay).
Associated honesty: though I'll always recommend top-shelf PSUs to others because I'd feel bad if their families had their faces burned off, I run the shittiest shit able to be shit out the shit-maker. You know - the not-even-gold-certified OEM garbage which hums so loud you can't even hear people in the same room, which is on 70% clearance sale direct from the manufacturer's warehouse of misery and regrets, where they ship it out with the metal enclosure mangled and barely hanging onto the actual PSU, where you have to bang it back together with your fists before jamming it into the cheapest case you could find so it can run on the $30 motherboard utilizing the latest 1-star 2005 refurb HDD (complete with an IDE connector) semi-attached to the case by only one screw.
Another fun fact proving why I deserve this forum handle: I didn't like the results given by home routers I had laying around, so I have my general PC (which is a bunch of components on a modular plastic shelving unit -- no case for three years, eaten and drunk over) taking a wireless signal from phone by using a dongle, internally bridging the connection to a LAN port which runs to a large Ubiquiti router. The general PC won't accept an Internet connection through the bridged connection, so a second dongle pokes out the general PC's motherboard. The Internet setup is made more complex by an outdoor and indoor antenna boosting 3G and 4G signals. Naturally, these aren't hard-wired, but instead run loose along the floor. Still, this is far superior to my previous solution of making my own phone antennas out of copper wire and gorilla tape (this eventually ruined the phone's 3G radio).