I found an article pointing out a possible flaw in the cooling solution on the EVGA GTX970.
"Obviously, not all of the new cards hitting the market are created equally and early suggestions are saying the new EVGA GTX 970 ACX cooler isnt being used to its full potential.
The images of the new card and its cooler suggest that theyve used the cooler from a bigger card to save on manufacturing costs; the problem here being that one of the three heat-pipes barely makes any contact with the GPU. Rival cards are out pacing the EVGA card in the cooling department and its likely that the card could be performing better in benchmarks if the cooler was used to its full potential.
As you can see in the picture below the chip is barely touching the first heat pipe, although it may not be touching at all as most of the thermal paste on the pipe looks like excess from around the edge of the chip. The 2nd (middle) heat pipe is fine and so is the 3rd on the right; but you can clearly see that the chip is overhanging the heat-pipes by several millimetres on the right. It definitely appears that the chip and the pipes are poorly aligned."
http://www.eteknix.com/evga-gtx-970-feature-manufacturing-defect/
and EVGA responded
"The way the EVGA GTX 970 ACX heat sink was designed is based on the GTX 970 wattage plus an additional 40% cooling headroom on top of it. There are 3 heat pipes on the heatsink 2 x 8mm major heat pipes to distribute the majority of the heat from the GPU to the heatsink, and a 3rd 6mm heatpipe is used as a supplement to the design to reduce another 2-3 degrees Celsius. Also we would like to mention that the cooler passed NVIDIA Greenlight specifications.
Due to the GPU small die size, we intended for the GPU to contact two major heat pipes with direct touch to make the best heat dissipation without any other material in between.
We all know the Maxwell GPU is an extremely power efficient GPU, our SC cooler was overbuilt for it and allowed us to provide cards with boost clocks at over 1300MHz. EVGA also has an FTW version for those users who want even higher clocks.
Regarding fan noise, we understand that some have expressed concerns over the fan noise on the EVGA GTX 970 cards, this is not a fan noise issue but it is more of an aggressive fan curve set by the default BIOS. The fan curve can be easily adjusted in EVGA PrecisionX or any other overclocking software. Regardless, we have heard the concerns and will provide a BIOS update to reduce the fan noise during idle."
http://www.eteknix.com/evga-respond-possible-design-flaw-gtx-970-acx/
In the end it might not be a big deal, but perhaps something potential customers would be interested in.
The MSI one. I'm torn between MSI and Gigabyte. I know I can fit the 12.5" of Gigabyte in my case but man is that large (not to mention 10-20 dollars more expensive than everything else)
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