Technical Question on benefits of extra case fans.. Need an Air Cooling Guru

I just made an interesting observation and I was wondering if someone could explain this to me. Basically, I'm wondering how much case fans make a difference in temperature. I was in Colombia for a couple of months, I had a NZXT Tempest, which has a total of 6 Fans, all stock. I'm running a i7 960 with a Noctura NH-D14 at stock clocks, ambient temperature in Colombia for the most part is about 23C, and In the Tempest I was getting Idle CPU temps of 51C.

When I flew back to NJ, I left the Tempest Case in Colombia, I put all my same components in an old NZXT Nemesis I had laying around. The tempest only has 3 Fans, 1 Front, 1 Rear, and 1 Side, also stock. Ambient here in NJ the day I put everything together in the Nemesis was about the same, 23C. I was shocked to see my CPU temps were the same, 51C at idle. To top it off, when I took these readings the Nemesis had no cable management whatsoever, whereas the Tempest had a pretty good cable management setup.

It seems the extra 3 fans in the Tempest didn't really make a difference, at least not when looking at idle cpu temps. I've sinced overclocked my i7 960 to 4.1GHZ at 1.325 Vcore, and I'm only maxing out at 83C under load in the old Nemesis Case, which is not too bad considering the Nemesis is pretty outdated.

My question is: is there any research or studies showing the benefits of additional case fans and air flow, or does the airflow benefit other components I didn't bother to observe temperatures for, such as MB, Hard Drive and Ram?

Thanks to anyone who wants to comment or put things in perspective.

I'll also add that I had those 5 of those 6 fans on the Tempest hooked up to a NZXT sentry, running at 100%, so they were definately being used to their maximum. It just seems that there are diminishing returns as you add case fans.

I also commented that cable management in the new case i'm using (nemesis) is non existant, (it looks like a bomb of cables) and I still had the same temps as the larger and more organized Tempest that I painstakingly took the time to route the cables with.

Again, it might be that there are diminishing returns as you add case fans to reduce CPU temp, but maybe other compents do benefit as you increase fans.

Has anyone identified a delta associated with no cable management vs organized cables for better airflow? Just curious if cable managment has any practical gains in temps as well, or if it just for aesthetics.

Thanks for all the informative input BTW.