Varna said:
Appreciate the suggestions. I'm definitely going to buy side panel fan. I have a few ventilated PCI slots as well. I think I will just buy a simple pci fan to help with pushing air out too.
Changing the fan profiles definitely helped. I was using the same profile I had set up for my 460 and that was simply not working too well. I set a new one and the card doesn't get nearly as hot in the more intensive games (crysis, 3dmark). 75c is the highest it will get now, I want to drop it to 70c. Hopefully the extra fans will help without the noise getting to crazy.
Cool. One of the reasons I was asking about your specific case and GPU were to see if certain solutions would be better tailored to your build.
In your case, I'd skip the PCI fan, or at least, leave it for last. Start off with the side fan (an option that isn't suited to some builds). Looks like it won't be directly feeding the blower, but I'd be surprised if your temps didn't go down about 2-3c or so at least. You'll be cooling the GPU's PCB and some air should reach the CPU and motherboard as well.
Since you have a reference EE card, some of the side fan's cool air may be wasted if you immediately add vented slots. Try the fan alone first, and then see how things go when you add the vented slots to the mix later. Depending on how many SSD and HDD you have, and how warm they are, the vents might help with that as well.
One thing, though, you may want to get some kind of sound dampening mounts for the side fan to reduce the vibrations that it's going to cause.