Cool and informative article! I have to say, unless you're rolling in cash, its hard to weigh these options without knowing what the price differences between the options are. I did some googling, but its a lot of variation.

A couple questions:
-If you have no existing water cooling, is additional cooling a significant increase in power (presumably through higher available clock speeds)?
-What sort of cost difference is there between a founders card and a similarly featured custom card? / Are custom cards a huge price increase?
-What sort of performance metrics are we using to determine card strength? Are these 3Dmark benchmarks, games, video processing?