You can change how hard you run the cards while mining, to decrease the "torture". Since you're not going to produce hardly any hash, not much reason to run high stress level hashing.
You can mine with anything, cgminer, guiminer, etc
Cgminer supports ocl, not CUDA. GUIminer does to CUDA (and bypasses the 100% cpu as a result) thru the RPC I mentioned, but will be slower as it has not been maintained, IIRC.