Yeah, a bit disingenuous for two reasons:
1. There are no gains to be had keeping the core under 40C, we learned this with Maxwell (I personally learned this with Maxwell).
2. The cooler is vastly improved over Titan XP, simply setting both fans to 75% RPM 1080 Ti FE is a full 8C cooler than Titan XP (74C vs 82C) over 2.0GHz and 4-6% faster. Sure it makes noise, but the allure of water cooling, back in the days when performance used to scale with voltage, is the potential for higher sustained frequency and therefore performance.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/03/09/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1080_ti_video_card_review/10
And lastly, cost benefit analysis, $400 out the door for no measurable gain other than acoustic performance? I mean, people all over the forums dabbling with overclocking are stuck at the same 2.05GHz wall, even after that slap their Titan XP waterblock on and bring the core under 40C.
To me, this "review" smacks of an advertisement. I get it, water cooling is cool, I've done the same, adding a Kraken G10 and X41 to my 980 Ti silently expelling the heat from the case and keeping the core under 45C, but other than that, no real, substantive gains were attained. In fact, my hypothesis that getting the core under 50C would allow me to go from the 1500MHz I had already secured on air to 1550MHz, was, to my dismay, utterly falsified.
1080 Ti FE with the fan set to 70-80% is your best bet from cost / benefit and performance perspective (unlike non-reference youre expelling the heat from the case).
And the bit about the VRM's running warm, yeah actually all reviews to date using FLIR have noted that the VRM cooling ability of the reference sample is now rivaling non-reference performance.
Redo your test with the fan set to 80% and take another FLIR image, I guarantee you you won't have the mediocre results you are showing here with your "comparision" (ahem, advertisement).
What was that you say, oh heat soak, you mean like how PC Gamer set the fan to 80% and after two hours of 100% load over 2.0 GHz with PT at 120% the highest it hit was 75C?
Oh you don't like the "whooshing" noise? Too bad for you, I wear headphones.
http://www.pcgamer.com/geforce-gtx-1080-ti-overclocking/
Next time be more thorough with your "comparison". No one with a modicum of sensibility is going to keep the default 50% fan algorithm. 75C isn't dangerous, nor detrimental to the card, and there is no thermal throttling here.
If you want to shill for your sponsor, show the acoustic performance improvement with audio and video and a decibel meter.