I came to the conclusion that is was generally a better idea to remove heat by blowing the hot air out of the PC than by blowing room-temperature-air into the case.
Yeah, I agree that I need to work on doing that properly.

I first tried this by making a smal tunnel through which the heat from the CPU was directly blown out of the case, so that it couldn't add to the temperature inside the case.
I agree with this idea, but to do that I would need to reverse the direction of the Intel-supplied fan that sits atop the CPU. Its current design has it blowing downwards onto the heat sink. I wonder if there's a way I can just flip it?

I wouldn't do that if I were you. No matter how "quiet" these little fans are supposed to be, they will ALWAYS be more noisier than their bigger brothers. The reason is simple : a small fan has to rotate faster to move an equal amount of air as a larger fan, and thus tends to be noisier. It's for this reason that I modded my case with a dremel tool so that 120mm fans would fit.
Interesting! Definitely something to consider.

Marvelous pictures, thank you!
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Tony Fabris