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I've just installed a 120mm fan and adapter to my tower (my tower is about 3mm to small but thanks to a little pressure to the cover it's now fitted) to get it a little quieter and boy has it made a difference. But as an added bonus the adapter I got also contained a 60mm to 80mm adapter which I've used on my heatsink to make that run quieter so that now it's so quiet I can hear the Intel Hamsters farting. It's great.
120mm fans definitely make a huge difference, and shift a lot more air. 80mm fans are really noisy in comparison, and quite inefficient as they have to spin so much faster to shift less air.
I only ever use 120mm fans. And if the case doesn't have mountings for them I've manually converting cases to fit them in the past.
Have you see the Commodore PC cases? Some of those use some huge side case fans and are amazingly quiet. One of their cases much of had a 240mm side case fan and you couldn't hear it at all, but it kept the system very cool.
A few years ago I had an Athlon XP system that had really bad overheating issues, and I kept adding more and more 80mm fans to it, without it helping much. In the end it had 4x 80mm fans at the front and 2 at the back. The system sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I had enough and replaced the case with one that had just 1 120mm fan at the front and 1 at the rear. It was amazingly quiet compared to the old one, and the same components were running about 10 degrees cooler.
Sometimes it isn't just the fans though, but bad case design, and only changing cases fixes the issue.
I've just got a 90mm at the front 120mm at the rear and an 80mm on the heatsink and the most noise comes from the PSU fans. I know the case is badly designed because it was cheap but as the PC is old I can't be bothered getting a new one. However I'm loving the lack of noise and cooler temp.