physics mate, less mass, less cooling capacity, unless you find a rock inside your gpu. You can't escape physics.
There are some nuaces to physics as well (and as usual the devil is always in the details) and thats where things get interesting! More mass means more capacity to store energy, the capability to radiate it in this case depends on the design, heatpipes, fins, quality, TIM material and
airflow. So more mass does not directly equal to less noise or better cooling performance, it means at best better capability to generate less noise.
This is evident in the data from the various reviews in this thread, metrics for some cards clearly show less noise, some are slightly cooler and some are clearly heavier, all are metrics from physics and implementation of physics,
just pick the metric(s) most important to you and choose accordingly =)
The XFX and Palit cards are perfect examples on this, they outweigh the competition by a up to a kg more and less and they are bulkier, but they are noisier. Maybe they would be less relative noise at 500w in, but that is not relevant, maybe they would be less noisy with a different fan curve or a different fan, but the fact is that they out of the box are not delivering better performance from a cooling
and noise perspective than e.g Sapphire and Powercolor (as can be seen in
all the reviews).
Fun anecdote is "
obsession with weight, in the absence of an understanding of what it may infer, led to Japanese manufacturers in the 70s and 80s to fit heavy plates to the bottom chassis of amps. This supported a sales technique of a customer to lift an amp to see how heavy it was and, therefore, how robustly it was constructed."
https://forums.audioholics.com/foru...ter-constructed-better-power-supplies.114110/ so it is nothing new=)
I suspect the vendors have different strategies here, they focus their marketing on differently, because we all different on what want, more than that some are smarter than others.
I will now shut up and not derail this =)
