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I plan on building a workstation specifically for octane, I plan on using 4 7xx series GPUs, I know these cards will be right next to eachother. has anyone had any heat problems using a setup like this? Do you guys think I can get away with using air cooling or do I need liquid cooling? I am fairly concerned about this because I have already built a 4x7950 litecoin mining rig WITH PCI riser cables so I could space them out and they still had overheating problems and got the guest room in my house to 80 degrees. Thank you in advance for all the help!

With 4 double slot width GPUs in the high end, you get substantial heat. If I ran 4 GPUs on a standard EATX/CEB boardsized PC, Id' probably go for reference design cards and get water cooling. but that's me. Also check if your 4 GPUs fit .. there's often the CPU cooler in the way in the frist slot, or board connectors (usb, sata, button/speajker headers etc) on the last slot, so you coul dhave difficulties fitting the GPUs in tehre.

Watercooling is better; the cards will be about 40/45 degrees instead of 80/85.
But I chose not to go for watercooling and went for aircooling stead.
First reason was to save money... watercooling might be 1000 euro extra.
Second reason is I wanted to be flexible in changing GPU easiy in future.

I have 4 x 580 's and they produce a lot of heat... I have a big case and a lot of fans.

The temperatures during the benchmark were 85/80/77/71 ºC
It is not too bad.. Only in summer it is real hot summer in the working space... But that is only a few weeks a year,
(and then.. In fact... I should not be working during the summer holiday and go to the beach )
The noise of the machine is not too bad, but I had all existing fans replaced by more silent ones;
surprisingly it doesn't make much more noise then my oldest PC. The H100 watercooler for the CPU makes the most annoying sound, because it is not a steady sound .
The 580 I purchased where the classified version and if I rember it correctly they have a better aircooling architecture then the regulars.

So, it is possible with aircooling and having the cards close to each other and I do not regret having it done with aircooling.
Although watercooling will give you more speed if you want to do overclocking.

These are the specs:

4x gtx 580 3gB classified
Enermax Fulmo GT ( case) with a lot of fans:
- Silverstone AP181 180mm ( 5x fans: 4x left panel + 1x front ) 
- Scythe Typhoon 1450Rp 120mm ( 2x fans top panel)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 120mm ( fan right panel behind cpu)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 140mm ( 5x fans: 2x for hdd front +2x bottom+ 1x rear)
- Scythe Kaze Q12 ( fan controller )

Edited
I had to skip skip a few from my first config and now have 9 fans. This is the finally use of fans:
- Silverstone AP181 180mm ( 3x left panel )
- Scythe Typhoon 1450Rp 120mm ( 2x fans top panel)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 120mm ( 1x fan right panel behind cpu)
- Scythe Slip Stream 500Rp 140mm ( 3x fans: 1x for hdd front +1x bottom+ 1x rear)
- Scythe Kaze Q12 ( fan controller )

Enermax Maxrevo 1500W ( power unit)
Intel Core i7 3930K ( processor )
Corsair Hydro H100 ( processor cooling)
Asus Rampage IV Extreme ( mortherboard)
Corsair Vengeance 32Gb ( 8x4Gb memory)
2x Samsung 830 128Gb ( raid 1 of 0? SSD )
Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb ( HD )
W7 64bits

In my signature you can see I have a second machine... I just added two Titans and a few fans.
The case was big enough to add them... They are also very close together, but it works fine.
This one has 950watt PSU and so far I have no problems. The temps are also about 80/85 degrees.
And the noise is pretty low compared to the 4*580, but then, the fans in the 580case are with more and turned on faster.

I run a very similar system to rappet's with very similar results both heat and noise wise.

T.

it's cruel to sandwich cards together like that. what about some PCI-E riser cables so you can spread them out and get some air flow between them?