When at load with games, I can hear my Radeon 5970's fan spool up, but I don't use speakers and instead have a nice set of Sennheiser headphones, so once those go on I can't hear a thing usually.
It's 27° C and otherwise, the system is fairly quiet. I can hear the Scythe fans slightly, but "acoustics be damned" when you have so much power squeezed into a Micro ATX case
Well, there's no doubt that leaving a computer on 24/7 will increase one's electric bills. That's why, it's best not to (plus, it gets you greater component longevity - it's like a two-fer!).
As someone who has done both SLI and CrossFire, trust me, I know fully well just how much power can be utilized by a system when under full load. But see, that's the thing - you often aren't under full load. I have friends who sometimes keep their systems on to run @Home or such, but that's the exception, not the rule.
All of my systems, Macs and PCs, are set to either sleep after an hour of inactivity, or I actually shut them down (in the case of my gaming system/workstation). Even with a "power efficient" iMac, you'll see a savings by shutting it down when it won't be in use for an extended period. That's simple common sense.
As for FERMI running hot, yes, it does. It's a good thing though that the comparable Radeon 58XX series actually runs cooler than its predecessors. "Yay AMD amirite?"
I'm not disputing that a lot of people didn't use SLI with the Voodoo2, but you said that its main feature (and I should have said features, since SLI did count as another one upon its release) weren't supported by games for over a year, and that wasn't true. SLI was "supported" right away (unlike nVidia and AMD's implementations, 3Dfx's didn't require game support if I recall), and the dual-texturing already was supported by Quake II.
The Voodoo2s were nice, but were more a stepping stone of sorts to what is still one of my favorite GPU series of all time, the Voodoo3 series.
But that's the case for ALL cards, even to this day, and that's basically been how it's always been. Games very, very, very rarely ever ship with even a top-of-the-line card as top recommended, because companies know that most people don't have them, and so if people read that a top-model card that costs $600 is what's "recommended", they'll likely sell fewer games.
However, just as it's also always been, buying a top-model card yields you greater performance on games that aren't CPU-limited. A Radeon 5970 is overkill for the likes of Warcraft III, Half-Life II, WoW, etc. It's most certainly not overkill for Crysis/etc. (especially when Eyefinity is being used ;D)
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine any game of the last few years running "ok" with Intel HD graphics. Even WoW, as old as it is, brings that "card" to its knees on anything above low-moderate settings.
Where are you seeing this? I'm not saying it isn't true, but I've never seen it listed that it's 87plus, and Apple certainly doesn't seem to list any information about it on their site besides calling it "energy efficient".
You mean like how a few years ago Apple suffered from bad capacitors as well?
http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=60930
Also, the capacitor "plague" was limited more to budget mainboards. They're used in the DIY community, yes, but to no great extent. It sucked, but typically it was always covered under warranty (just as Apple covered the issue under warranty above).
I've used a wide range of mainboards, from boards that were cheap (high school), to more premium boards (today, usually always ASUS), and I've never had a board fail on me. It obviously happens, but even a failure here or there wouldn't sway me (in fact, the only failures I've had have been HDs and one GPU which was actually my fault).
