the 400 series was kind of a mistake. the fermi architecture was superb at number-crunching, but it was absurdly power-hungry and threw off ungodly levels of waste heat. it's interesting because the aptly-named 'volcanic islands' GPUs such as the 290x actually post power-draw and thermal numbers not too far off from the 460 or 480, but since radeon has already established they don't give a flying fuck about TDP nobody gives it any thought. the sapphire tri-x isn't bad (which is funny considering most of sapphire's entry-point and mid-tier products are absolute shit), but you might get better thermal numbers by prying off the tri-x and using a bracket like the nzxt kraken g10 to slap an asetek-compatible closed-loop cooler onto your GPU.
