I didn't ignore it, I was contesting that the assumptions behind it (aka a large case with a lot of airflow) are always in place. You assume someone wants to dedicate space to proper cooling, when the PC building trend since 2013 is "how small can I make this gaming box?" Sacrifices must be made to hit that goal.
In my Fractal Node 304 mini ITX rig it doesn't matter how many fans the GPU has. The distance from the fans to the side of the case is less than half an inch, so the fans push out the air only for it to stay put in pretty much the exact same proximity as the GPU. And there is no sort of real airflow in that part of the case from case fans, which means you are basically just cooking the GPU in its own heat. Without a blower model pushing the air out the back it basically is an oven.
I watched as my otherwise excellently cooled EVGA 970 couldn't overclock at all in that case when in my regular ATX rig I could get it to 1450 easily. Open air cards do a great job cooling off the card, but that only matters if the heat has anywhere to go. The only difference in that situation between three fans and two is with a larger gpu HSF its actually WORSE in a Mini ITX rig because there is no way for case fan air to flow around the long card. It's a completely different ballgame in such a case than in a regular ATX one, and those are the types of compromises companies like HP make every single time for aesthetically pleasing final products. Hence reference models are blowers.
In the case of OP, the optimal situation would have been for him to build a real Unraid server out of another machine and NEVER expose his media hard drives to GPU heat. Gaming boxes + mediaservers often = dead hard drives for that reason. Seeing how he already made a suboptimal decision for how to store his media, the best choice for the GPU is another suboptimal decision to get a blower that won't subject the hard drives to any of the GPU heat even if it's just what the case fan is blowing by on its way out the case. He admits the airflow is poor, which means its a closer situation to my Mini ITX rig (or your average HP gaming box) than the ATX rigs everyone here uses and takes for granted.
I will fully admit in a regular case and in optimal situations there is no benefit to a blower card. In fact its a detriment for the reasons you list.
Very insightful, thank you for that read.
Yes, I made a strange decision to have one box that does it all, and I know I could split them in two, but for some strange reason it seems an all in one box is just idea. Jack of all trades type.
With CPUs becoming less depending on energy and adding more cores to solve the speed issues, it seems all them cores will just go to waste and it will be benefit if they could be used for something. I know main stream is still 4c/8t, and I do have a HEDT 8c/16t, but the future is more cores. AMD ZEN is around the corner with 8c/16t and more, Intel next mainstream after canon lake will be 6c/12t as well.
and with DirectX 12 it seems the trend is that lower mhz cpus with more cores are better than higher mhz with less cores. And it is just the beginning with DX12/Vulkan and as well as the future of VR taking off, more and more cores will be needed. I really don't see using multiple boxes in a single home to get things done anymore.
But that is just me, I rather have one large, fast desktop, with laptops, tablets, and cell phones. Besides me, no one else sits at a desk all dau and types on a PC. Damn kids are all touch screen base now days.
One thing I would like to say I guess between a blower / AIB or AIO watercool is most people do it because for overclocking. The fact these cards don't overclock well and use double the power just to achieve a 10% over clocking is kinda silly. Once we get HBM2 things will be better, less power, more head room for memory bandwidth. Today's GPU chips are insanely fast, but seems like the API/Developers/OS is the limiting factor in getting things up to par, not a 10% overclocking.
And I agree with you, Small ITX gaming builds are awesome, or a all-in-one like mine. That is the trend going. I doubt we will see manny more full size ATX gaming builds in the future.