Blower vs open air cooling in Micro ATX case

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I'm trying to build a mATX living room gaming PC.

As I understand it, the more (cool) air the open air coolers have available within the case, the better they work. Hence, those tight and packed mATX cases would theoretically do much better with a blower.

It would be nice if anyone had any experience with the particular case I'm looking at, but even generally, is the temperature difference noticeable (>5°C)?

Also, could custom case fans help the open air cooling significantly?

The case is Aerocool Dead Silence

PS: I'm partial to the "stock" blower card designs, so if the differences aren't huge, I'll probably run with it either way.
 
Two big factors are the ventilation to the case and the heat of the GPU itself. You say this is a living room PC. Where is it going to be? What kind of breathing room does it have? And what GPU are you considering?

If you're not using a particularly hot GPU, then you may not see a big thermal difference, especially if the case itself has good airflow.
 

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Two GPUs are at the table at the moment, GTX 970 4GB and R9 380 4GB
The ventilation choice concerns only the nVidia card though, it's either
http://www.newegg.com/global/uk/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121926
or
http://www.newegg.com/global/uk/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121899

I'm also a bit curious how big is the difference between their noise levels. I'm alright with the fuss AMD cards are making but anything more than that seems to be too loud, not sure if I'd get used to it.

The PC will be on a TV bench, there should be enough breathing room both behind and above it.
 
Yep, the 970 will definitely run cooler, regardless of case size or shape, and at 1080 resolution, the performance difference between them is negligible. The 970 also has HDMI 2.0, meaning if you upgrade to a 4K TV, it can feed it at a full 60fps. Not sure if that makes a big difference, since a single 970 can barely game at 4K.
 

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on smaller build i tend to use blowers as case air flow is limited in most. as for the noise well i have also found in small cases that cards with open coolers tend to run the fans harder then in big cases and thus become as loud as a blower card anyways. My 2 cents