I was on the phone with tech support for a laptop display issue and they pointed me to a nice set of tools to test the video card:

• hwmonitor  http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php
• VideoCardStabilityTestSetup.exe http://freestone-group.com/
• TechPowerUp http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1379/TechPowerUp_GPU-Z_v0.3.4.html

The video card temperature initially should be around 75 degrees Celsius and after 5 min of VideoCardStabilityTest.exe use,  it should not be above 95 degrees Celsius.

-Hanu