I can attest to shawty's remark about how cool the 7 series nvidia GPUs run. I used to have a 6600GT AGP. With stock cooler, it idled at 60+C and load at almost 90C.

Now I'm using a Unika 7900GS, has a pretty good stock cooler that's dualslot, but is basically just a fan embedded in a large heatsink. Idle is 38C and load is 55C. This is even when mildly overclocked to 550/1500. Excellent.

Yes, the X1950Pro has a line of voltage regulators near the core which need cooling. Now it's handled by the stock heatsink, so if you switch, you'll need to get some heatsinks on that too.

As in terms of price, the HR-03 is actually a good deal IMO @ RM185. Much better than the similarly priced FC-ZV9. It's flexible too in terms of fan configuration and orientation, that alone makes it good value to me.

The stock cooler is fine, what your opinion of an "acceptable" temperature is will differ from the next person so in the end it's up to you. Sure, if it's cooler it might conceivably have a longer lifetime, but the difference is not enough to affect most people since you'll probably upgrade before the card gives up the ghost anyway.