[pHaestus]

I would say that if your "low flow engineering over brute force" kit performed within 1-2C of the brutish American jobs then that is clearly a victory. Noise/performance ratio is also pretty hard to deal with because everyone's threshold of annoyance is different. Surely we can iron out something though. The "winning" and "losing" is sort of incidental as it would be a really good chance to discuss design choices and how to improve cooling/decrease noise levels for the DIYer in any case. But it would make the process more interesting, wouldn't it?