one or both may have been CPU fans actually. I have a lay flat "case" with 2 externally mounted 5830's. I wanted to cool them with my spare fans but blowing into the tail end would counteract the existing cooling and the same goes for the other end. I couldn't blow down into the case because that would be really unwise and sucking air upward from a top-mounted fan would probably result in lower density air and less of it going through the card's actual cooler. So I had to blow upward from below the cards.There was enough room with my 1x to 16x adapter cables so I went to the hardware store and got a 4 ft 1/8" round wooden dowel. I cut it into eight 5.5 inch strips and put about 3 inches of electrical tape around in a circle on each. They fit perfectly inside the mounting screw holes and with a little more tape, I basically had a cooling fan on stilts
I picked wood cuz it doesn't conduct and could stand directly on the motherboard without problems. It worked pretty well temperature-wise but those fans just weren't amazing so today I got a Coolermaster sickle blade 120 or 140mm (I forgot) fan that can push a whipping 90CFM! A standard crappy generic 70mm case can usually do about 20CFM. That's umm...I forgot but it's a volume over time measurement so it's like gallons per minute of air but some metric version. This thing took my hottest card from 71C @ 52% fan speed to 68C at 46% fan speed! Definitely an improvement and I was able to overclock it a lot higher without much difference in heat. This thing was blasting so hard, I was worried the thin wood wouldn't hold it down and it might take off 
So if you're looking for a nice way to cool your cards, just put a really nice fan or just any fan you have laying around in there under them on wooden dowel stilts. It works really, really well. I'll try and get some pics or a video of precisely how they're arranged later.