Speaking of fans and keeping the cards cooler and the whole "power draw discussion", has anyone tried using the fans on a fan header or different controller, and notice a total GPU board power drop? I feel if you offload the fans to a separate power source, you may not run into the power limit as fast for the GPU.
I'm planning on running 6x ML120s push/pull on a controller with SATA power, and maybe let the card still get the PWM cable so the card can determine the speed but let the power come from elsewhere, or just run a curve in a third party program.