I donīt really follow: are you saying that nouveau fries cards?
Iīve been testing nouveau with the fedora betas since f11 on my nvidia collection and had no such problems so far.
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Nah hes just saying that because although open nouveau is essentially a reverse engineered driver where the open ati one is documented and within a year or so should support 3d on all cards. It's running on all but the latest chipset at the moment in some form or another.
From Ben Skeggs (nouveau developer at Red Hat):
"Well, nouveau uses the card at the performance level (so, voltage, clock speeds, fan level) that the video BIOS initialises it to. One would assume the VBIOS knows what its doing and programs the card to a safe configuration. And on every VBIOS I've seen, it programs the card to the lowest possible performance level.
In any case, nouveau's in no different position to nv or vesa in that regard.
Aside from that, there's really nothing we can do at this point. With our current knowledge, we'd likely do more harm than good even attempting to control the GPU performance levels."
So, there's the story.
it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference until we get 3D working :)