Replacing dead fan on video card.

A fan on my video card (NVidia 9800 GT, by Innovision) died in a curious way - it fails to start in one position, so that every restart was like a round of russian roulette. It finally began crashing from overheating during work on ThePolynomial.
I replaced it with 1.5€ case fan:

held in place with rubber bands cut from old bike inner tube. Card runs colder than ever, and, surprisingly, with less noise.
If you do this, keep old fan for warranty.
Other options were:
a: send for replacement and wait 2 weeks. Not an option.
b: upgrade to something badass like NVidia GeForce GTX 295. Hmm. No good for keeping my game's system requirements low.
c: buy third party heatsink for ~70€ and void the warranty, a very bad idea as the GPU did overheat when fan broke.

edit: Corrections. My card did not have any box around it that would prevent such fix without voiding the warranty. I always buy no-nonsense computer parts.