The stock fan was easily the noisiest thing in my rig, those who think its quiet have noisy rigs and/or live in noisy environments.
The S1 works wonders yet again, but does require some modding for ideal performance
With a 120mm fan strapped to it (one of the mods), my temps idle at 26C and load at 49C with those "power viruses". Games will generally load around 41-43C (this is stock clocks and volts, I haven't pushed my card yet because I ran in to a fiasco where I thought I might have killed my card, so I'm still a bit timid to fiddle with her again just yet, although I'm sure things are perfectly fine, at any rate its obvious I have plenty of room to spare when I finally do overclock).
The other mods include bending a few fins to avoid the extended DVI ports (an incredibly easy mod) and bending some fins to avoid part of the base plate that sticks up (a bit trickier as you have to know which fins would get in the way).
And I would definitely recommend using the base plate with whatever aftermarket cooler you use, the VRMs are actually the weakest link for me (and I would wager they would be for anyone with better than stock cooling), and the base plate will cool these far better than the dinky stick-on garbage that will likely be included with any after market cooling (including the S1).
I ran into trouble both before using the base plate, and after. Before using the base plate my VRMs were getting waaaayyyy too hot. So I decided to try and put the base plate back on. Problem was its connected to the plastic heatsink shroud by these super tiny screws and I ended up stripping them out of impatience (using too large a screwdriver). After I was able to drill the stripped screws out, I had the base plate, but I had damaged some of the stock thermal pads. So I reused some old thermal pads to replace them but either I didn't remount the base plate properly or the old thermal pads were garbage, because the card would quit working on my and shut my system down periodically, and eventually the VRM temps stopped showing up in GPU-Z. So I unistalled the base plate again and just used a small dab of Arctic Silver Ceramic on each of the VRM chips (the thermal pads for the RAM were perfectly fine) and reinstalled the base plate and that did the trick, the card works perfect again.
Just thought I'd share. All of my troubles were due to personal negligence caused by impatience and inexperience (never did I expect the VRMs to be that demanding). If I did it again, I'd make sure to have a proper sized screw driver to begin with, and I'd probably strip and clean off the VRM thermal pads and apply Ceramique right away.