Right, but running a mining program on them is about the same as running Furmark on them. They are both pushing the GPU to its limits and for extended periods of time. You are putting your gpu under extreme load with either.
Before I even got the card I did some research, many articles pointed to using linux and some heavy tweaking to make it work with decent performance so I really didn't consider using the card for mining at first.
Then just when I got the card I read about claymore. The setup was so easy, I couldn't resist.
From what I've read as long as the card in not pushed too hard nor getting too hot I should be fine, so...
Besides at least during last week I really didn't have time to game at all.