Highly impressed by NVidia's reference cooler!

[Madpacket]

I love blower style coolers. Even on the 480 they work pretty well after the card is properly voltage adjusted. These blower fans last forever and handle case temperature fluctuations from other components better than open air (front intake radiator for CPU cooling for example). They also keep heat away from other board components like M.2 PCIe slots.

Normally you save a small handful of cash and usually have better power characteristics with reference cards. Plus it was already mentioned but crossfire or SLI work much better with blower fans unless you have really good case airflow or go water.

Yes the trade-off for these advantages is a louder card so if silence is your #1 priority then ignore them.

 

[Carfax83]

I dont have that card, but in the past i had stock reference Nvidia and AMD designed coolers and my god...They would sound like a vacuum cleaner at load, and my computer is in another room to. But maybe they have improved their stock design even though that stock cooler looks like what my old GTX 480 had..

Edit, looks like it is improved over the old design so nevermind.

Yeah, they've been massively improved. The last reference cooler that I used was back when I had GTX 580 SLi, and those were loud as hell; basically vacuum cleaner loud!

But the new reference cooler from NVidia has a more subdued static sort of sound, which is much more tolerable, even at high RPMs.