in the right situation open air might help, my temps are about the same as when it was in my cooler master case, if your friend is seeing a 5-8 degree difference I would suggest playing around with different fans and different configurations. In my cooler master I had one intake up front and one in the bottom, an exhaust at the top rear the power supply flipped so it was sucking from the case and off my graphics card and my cpu cooler turned 90 sucking air in from the top......not the best way for air flow but it worked better that way