Yeah, I know running the cooling for the cards in parallel will give better cooling, but I don't think there will be space to put in the connections to do that.
The reason for using the GTX295 is that with the software we're currently thinking of using, CUDA support is required, and the GTX295 is currently the most powerful CUDA card on the market.
I'll most more details once (if) it gets finalized, but for now it's still in the proposal stage.