OK so I've gotten my VTX flashed to 290x card yesterday. I've left the card completely at stock (not even increased the power limit) and ran Valley bench on loop for nearly an hour, and the temp is better than I thought it'd be.
Note that I have set up a custom fan profile on MSI Afterburner with minimum 30% fan speed, and 50% fan speed on 90C, and this is the result:
I have to say, while 89C is not "great" temp, but bearing in mine I've set the fanspeed max at just 50% at 90C, so it is definitely better than what I'd expect. The VRM temp is not too bad as well I would think.
My case is arounds 1 metres away from me on the floor, and at fanspeed of 50% and 55%, while I can hear it, but if you were gaming with the speakers on at even normal level (not loud), the noise is not instrusive; however for people who got their case on the desk at ear level, then the noise would may be too much for them. I've also ran Heaven on loop for an hour with max fanspeed set to 55% at 90C, and it was only hitting 86-87C max.
I would like to point out my case has "extremely good" airflow with lots of fans (and cool air being directly feed to the stock cooler's intake), so I would imagine for people that only got "good" airflow might get around 3-5C higher in temp if using the same settings as mine above.
As it stand, I find 50% fanspeed is not too bad for me, and is enough to keep the GPU temp *just* below 90C. I would imagine if I gonna do high overclock on this card, I gonna have to increase the fanspeed.
If I'm completely honest, cooling wise the stock cooler up to the job, however the problem is turning the fanspeed up too high, the noise level would become unbearable. Also I would imagine during the summer time, while turning up the fanspeed MAY BE enough to keep the card cooled, but the noise level would be hitting unbearable level...so what I'm trying to say is, while I can use the card at reasonable noise level during the winter, I would imagine the need for getting a 3rd party cooler is just a matter of time.
Edited: Have tried tweaking a little more, and found that put the profile of fanspeed up ro 55% at 80C and 60% at 90C I was manage to keep the temp not exceeding 85C in Heaven most of the time. It's a bit louder, but still not instrusive enough along the use of the speaker at normal level volume. The temp is definitely at a better place at 85C max than just 1-2C short of 90C.
Also I've tried 100% fanspeed, and it was able to keep the temp in Heaven at just 70C...but of course it was loud as hell.
I've already order the Gelid Icy Vision Rev 2...will report back once I received and installed it. Was originally thinking of getting the Arctic Accelero Xtreme III, but it is a) only comes with enough ram sink (12) for 3GB of vram so would require getting Alpenföhn Passive DRAM / VRAM Chip Coolers (£12), and would put the cost up to a total of around £60, whereas the Gelid comes with enough ramsink (16) for 4GB of vram and cost just under £33 delivered. Also the Xtreme III would be too long to fit into my CoolerMaster 690II Advanced case, as I've current have a fan mounted on the side of the drive-cage, so that's 25mm shorter in length available for the graphic card and removing that fan could be a bit of pain for me, due to the way how the screws are screwed in.