Is there no way to use a few 40mm fans? With the end of the card sitting next to the front of the casing due to the length, this could even be better in terms of sucking air from the front instead of from the inside of the PC.
Exactly. That is Plan B. The pitch between double-wide pcie cards is 40.64mm. So 40mm fans will fit, but will violate the max-allowable-thickness in the pcie spec (spec says 39-point-something mm - can't remember exactly... so the violation is 100's of microns... which'd be fine by me). 40mm fans would also be a bit noisier, two would be slightly pricey.... but the #1 drawback is my boss: she's never seen such a setup on a production board, so that's that
The benefit of 40mm fans is that, thanks to the 1U server market, you can get buy hugely-powerful ones - when a
60-watt 40mm fan starts to spool up, people run for cover, cuz it sounds like sh*t's about to go down; they are comically loud.