It actually can, through overheating. My PC started beeping while playing UT3 too, and if I were to ignore that, I'm pretty sure something would have melted. So in your case something might have melted already. So make sure there's no dust and good airflow before you play UT3, and also enable BIOS overheat warnings (under PC Health) for the CPU so you could hear if it's about to overheat.
Too late for that. Now it's resting in a small, cardboard coffin that my relatively new Network Card was stored in. I mean, it still works with UT2004, but then I get "killer polygons" and eventually the game completely crashes. I uninstalled the whole game thinking that was the problem, but then I couldn't reinstall it, and now all I have is Unreal Gold installed from the original CD. I miss playing with your UT3 Weapons mutator...
Also, if I were to enable AA on Unreal 227, I get graphical errors that look like rainbow colored stripes going through every texture which eventually either leads to a game crash, a computer freeze, or a blue screen. I pulled the card out immediately after this happened and not only was the heatsink friggin' hot like it should have been, the main card was fairly warm as well, although that may just be normal as well.
So yeah, one of my most favorite games ever (UT3) actually eventually prevented me from playing my OTHER favorite games. The irony is sweet, glaring, and horrendously painful, and since my anthology disk broke, I can't install Unreals Gold through Tournament 2004. And now I'm a miserable pile of... hey, how much is it on Steam? It really sucks to buy something I already have, though.