Thanks for the explanation! That was enlightening.
However, I'm not very smart, so the quoted part is exactly the type of stuff that piques my curiosity, hence the original question, haha.
On a more serious note, what kicks off my thought process is the following: in GPUs and PSUs manufacturers almost universally cheap out on the fans and people get better results temperature- or noise-wise when they swap them, even when they swap to a more premium option of the same diameter, not bigger. So it would at least be interesting to see if anyone cheaped out on the fans enough for the results to be noticeable on the various air towers.
You are not wrong per se, but there's a solid reasoning.
The internal specification for a GPU or CPU is basically that at ambient temperature T1, with maximum temperature of the device T2, design the cheapest thing that will meet performance numbers. Note that I did say a cost optimized solution is one case where better fans would make a difference. The endgame for the founders or base model is that you get virtually no overclocking headroom, and the thing runs to the hottest temperatures it is designed for (potentially thermally throttling if your room temperature is too high).
Now, pretend you're a third party. Base price is X. If you add in an upcharge of Y, you could add $20 to the price of a thing when Y is $40, and you've just added a huge amount of profit to your bottom line. That doesn't make sense for the base model, which is meant to sell as cheaply as will be reliable, but there are a ton of consumers out there who'll gladly pay another $40 for a card they class as superior because of a few decibels less noise or a few degrees running cooler that the consumer themselves might take a risk and overclock with....or simply be fine doing nothing with to satisfy their perceived increase in longevity.
I'll say this another way....so we can have some fun. The base model is usually the McDonalds cheeseburger of the options. You could get something that's a throwback and maybe pay a little less (think no-name roadside fastfood), but there's also the Burgerking (flame broiled), high end (Five Guys and Shake Shack), or even the sit-down silliness of a Red Robin. They're all at their core a cheeseburger. That said, you can dress up a McDonalds patty with toppings from Five Guys, high end cheese from Shake Shack, and a bun from a local bakery. It comes to a point when you either believe you know better, or have a different set of goals than the people who set things up. I...vote that for the most part.
Unfortunately, it was already said in 2017...that any competently built unit can cool within marginal error of virtually any other.
TPU linked air cooler roundup on a German site. My money is that as long as I don't buy an enormous metal mass (the likes of Dark Rock and Macho had too much thermal mass, and were designed for a much higher TDP processor) I'll get within a few degrees of any other competent cooler...and the make it or break it could simply be how competently I get a thermal interface between CPU and cooler.
