I'm trying to figure this out for myself. I have a P183 case, which isn't really meant to be the best cooling case. I have a blower style card now (6950 Toxic) and I think I should probably stick with a blower. I was considering the 7970, but it seems like Nvidia has the crown when it come to blower style coolers on the 680, with regards to temps and sound. I just need to figure out which 680 is the best blower style card without overclocking.
So your logic is you'd buy a $500 blower card and then continue with the same outdated case for say another 4-5 years, spending hundreds (or thousands of dollars) on future CPU/GPU and platform updates, while all this time suffering from louder blower fans than go out now spend $120-130 on a new modern case with good airflow and never have to use the blower fan design again?
The reason why I contributed to this thread is because I know that PC gamers neglect good case airflow. This is so typical that I am not even surprised this
myth for a blower fan GPU being superior still persists to this day. PC gamers spend $100 on high end CPU coolers, $500-1000 on high-end GPUs, and then put it all in terrible case that was never designed properly to handle a high-end gaming PC, subsequently raising CPU and GPU temperatures by 10-20*C!!
For example, this is the Fractal R4 case that looks like your typical gaming case with 'good' airflow. And yet it isn't.
CPU & GPU cooling performance cannot be described by anything other than terrible. This 'modern' case which represents the typical Antec 183 style box case design, and other similar cases are not adequate to cool a modern gaming system @ quiet noise levels
without raising CPU and GPU temperatures by 10-20*C. The result of using such a case combined with a blower GPU reference design is what's forcing the GPU to ramp up fan speeds to even higher speeds to maintain reasonable GPU temperatures further exacerbating the noise levels in such a system.
If a gamer has a case with good airflow, he doesn't need to enable temperature controlled fan settings in the BIOS. You can run all your fans @ low RPMs, get quiet after-market fans and still sustain amazing cooling performance and noise levels. And such a case would have no trouble at all dealing with an after-market dump of 300-500W of heat dump.
If you guys bought a modern case with good airflow, put in a 250W GPU in it, and actually tested this in the real world, you wouldn't be defending the blower GPU designs. In fact, you'd probably never buy a blower fan GPU design ever again unless limited by space constraints in Tri-SLI or similar.
When I ditched my Thermaltake Soprano case for the case in my sig, my Core i7 860 @ 3.9ghz temperatures dropped
9-10*C at full load and I had one of the best air coolers at the time: Prolimatech Megahalems + Scythe S-Flex-E fan. Keep in mind the performance of the Megahalems is
among the best air coolers on the market. This type of temperature drop by just swapping the case is nothing short of incredible. The result were lower temperatures and noise levels across the motherboard, CPU, hard drives and GPU.
It's pretty unfortunate to see that even in 2012 PC gamers continue to disregard how important case cooling is and instead of solving their case airflow problem, they resort to buying reference blower GPU designs when the problem is right in front of them: their case airflow!
Spending $500 each new generation on a loud reference blower to mitigate heat dump is backwards thinking when all this can can be solved with a $120-150 case upgrade and allow for superior after-market cooling that will:
1) Drop GPU temperatures;
2) Result in much quieter GPU noise levels;
3) Result in much quieter overall system levels;
4) Allow for high GPU overclocking without significant noise level penalty (especially true for DirectCUII, Gigabyte Windforce 3x, Sapphire Vapor-X, PowerColor PCS+ and similar designs).
The same applies for replacing stock Intel and AMD heatsinks with after-market ones, which is basically a must to achieve a quiet Core i5 @ 4.3-4.5ghz system.