Well, I think I can agree that the cooler (solid copper) on this BFG is a POS. I don't know the quality of the first cooler for the BFG's.
I used star wars galaxies to check the temp because it runs well in windowed mode so I could watch the temp gauge. At first I thought it was high but not that bad. I ran around "playing" and it seem to hold at 90-91. Yes higher than most I've seen but not alarming. Then I noticed that when I didn't move (in the game) it seemed to put more pressure on the card. I'm not sure why but it slowly climbed to 100 C before I decided to shut down SWG. It might have went even hotter, but I was affraid to see. I don't see any reason to think 100 was the hottest was going to go. This was at 400/1100 clock settings. I noticed artifacts somewhere around 98 C.
I lowered the settings back to factory 370/1000 and the temp seems to max at 96 C. Not enough to cause artifacts but hot none the less.
My case I would consider a good cooling case but it is full of stuff. It is an all aluminum server size case. It has an extended ATX dual Opteron motherboard, 5 raptor SATA, SATA raid card, SCSI card, sound card, DAT drive, zip drive, floppy drive, CDRW drive, DVDRW drive, 2 fans in the front that blow over the hard drives, one large fan on the back, and a 560 watt powersupply with two fans (one internal and one external) in it.
I'm really really really disappointed with these results. Even though it seems to "play" fine with no artifacts and no lock ups, that temp scares me. I think I will be leaving it at default clock rate.