I have a GTS250 in my wife's computer. The cooling and fan on that are literally a five-cent POS solutution.
You realize that it's a 5 or 6 year old card and that most fans fail LONG before yours did right>?
It's just a coincidence that it failed on SWTOR, it's old, outdated, and was going to fail eventually no matter what. And yes, SWTOR is going to push that card beyond it's limits.
You realize that the 250 card is just an overclocked and reskinned 8800gts? or 9800gts? All 3 (8800, 9800, and 250) are just the exact same chips with slightly faster clock speeds and more memory on the card itself...the core architecture of the CPU is IDENTICAL.\
So yeah...the 8800 came out in 2006. SWTOR is more than maxing it out, especially if your fans picked up in speed on character select screens (MY 580GTX Lightning Xtreme's fans kick into high gear on loading screens too, but it is what it is)