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.
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