Look at your own photos: you have a soundcard (I assume) below your gpu then the edge of the case. The second intake fan in the front attacked to the hard drice cages blows over the BACK of your card (stealing air from the intake fan in the very front of the case) so you have no room for air to flow easily into the intakes of the gpu fans. And adding many fans running at right angles to each other creates turbulent flow which is less effective. Ideally you want the fans blowing air in the same direction from the front of the case and maybe the side toward the gpu then exhaust fans in the back sucking air out.
Tl:dr - take out the soundcard and put it between the gpu and cpu if you can't move the gpu up, make sure your fans are blowing air towards the front of your gpu but don't put a side fan at right angles to the flow of your front intake fans
[edit] and tidy up those cables in the front of the case that look like they block what little air tries to go down to the front of your gpu
Thanks for your suggestions but trust me it aint the gaps or the case it has approx 25% of its surface area full of vents/grills.
Bottom gap below GPU is about 1" Bottom of card is always cool to touch.
Top gap is about 2" its always red hot even motherboard outside the case!!!
Forget that cable tie fan it was just a ghetto mod to see if it made any difference. Same with the flat PSU cables the picture angle is deceptive they do not block anything.
If a 120mm side case fan cannot blow or extract any air which makes any difference temps wise but gaming @ 1080 makes up to 20C difference tells me the cards are designed to run hot.
I removed it when I found it made no difference.
Entire motherboard out of case makes no difference to temps its the internal card temps @ 4K gaming maxxed out they get hot regardless of anything.
The backplate clearly creates a hotspot. 4K gaming puts a massive load on the entire PC. In the course of exploring this I have found out so much I took for granted.
On Win 7 x64 Nvidia drivers are unstable @4K if your pagefile is disabled or not set to system managed. Regardless of Ram (I only have 12GB) they seem to be designed around the pagefile when 4K gaming.
1080 gaming on this card is silent at all times it barely troubles the fans.
4K puts a massive load on the whole system & a single GTX 980 Ti is barely enough in some games to handle 4K.
Temps drop up to 20C with no other changes @ 1080. 4K adds up to 20C.
For now I am going to run the MSI gaming app which takes the card down to stock GTX 980 Ti levels & removes the boost modes which is not even noticeable @ 4K outside of benchs. That alone has taken the card down to sensible temps. Then I will try EVGA precision X & set a target temp & see how that goes.
I am starting to think these gaming cards boost modes are a gimmick unless your using a water cooled system GPU Boost 2.0 produces a lot of heat & these cards already have hotspots under the backplates.
For a quiet life I can live with stock speeds.