I have owned bitspower blocks (580 GTX models) in the past, they are surprisingly well built, I put those things through torture, literally... Remove / Installed about 5 times, ran coolants, mayhem dyes, flushed with tap water then distilled uncountable times, in the end I use distilled and silver coil only for long use, the quality of the nickel never budged and it never leaked, they are pure eye candy if you pop some LED's in them..

Performance wise is a bit lacking, but beats stock air cooling by far,if you are after pure aesthetics, picture below is a old shot of mine.







for my new cards, I have ordered some AC blocks with the passive back plates

I wouldn't say back plates are purely aesthetics, for the temps it may not help much or be negligible as far as performance is concerned, but for the stability of the card, it really does help a lot, going tri or quad graphic cards + blocks + bridge, it weighs quite a bit.