Crunching stresses the cards in different ways from gaming. A knackered crunching card would still make for a very good general display card, and should run most average games. Some power-hungry games might not work, but others would.
The thing about the Quadro and Tesla cards is that they are grossly expensive. For GPUGrid they don’t make for good crunching cards in terms of initial outlay v productivity, and are not even better in terms of running cost v performance. So all they have going for them is reliability and possibly support.
The GF cards are much less expensive and perform better due to their higher clock speeds. They might not last as long for crunching, but they don’t have to. All they have to do is make it to the next generation of GPU, which usually offers better crunching performance. If you look after your high end GPU (good cooling and no over volting) it should last a couple of generations. Plenty of people are still using high end CC1.3 cards. By the time you reach 2 generations you should upgrade anyway. As for lesser GPU’s, especially with manufacturer-specific specs, these are less reliable. Don’t expect to crunch on these for 2 or 3 years.
The key to a good card is cooling. If going for air cooling get a dual fan card for high end cards and for medium to low end cards make sure they have large fans. The chipset-like cooler fans don’t cool the GPU enough and consistently fail, so avoid them.

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