The stock CryoVenom R9 290 clock rates are identical to Sapphire's retail card with AMD's reference heat sink and fan, yet we often encounter a wider range of results on that board due to the effects of throttling. That doesn't appear to be a big problem in Metro: Last Light using the Medium detail preset, however.

VisionTek's small win still counts though, and its overclocking headroom remains slightly superior.

The High quality settings apply more serious stress in this game, forcing Sapphire's air-cooled board to back down a little more.

Overclocking remains an option, and you might even say it's required at 4800x900. The air-cooled card barely stays at or over 20 FPS during our test.

Despite its higher average frame rate, VisionTek's CryoVenom R9 290 also experiences frame rate drops.
- Can A Liquid-Cooled Radeon R9 290 Be Affordable?
- CryoVenom R9 290: Meet The Card
- Test Hardware And Benchmark Settings
- Overclocking
- Results: 3DMark
- Results: Tomb Raider And F1 2012
- Results: Arma 3
- Results: Battlefield 4
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Metro: Last Light
- Power, Heat, And Efficiency
- Making A Value Case For Water-Cooling A GPU
Go look at the price of the acrylic/nickel block and the backplate. Assume they're stockpiling the leftover air coolers at some cost and will sell them in the far future for about the cost of stockpiling them.
AMD recently released these to distribution by manufacturing partners, so maybe they can now get them bare. But they couldn't when these were launched, and this is a launch card. Since I don't know the full details of AMD's recent move, I cannot comment further.
In the USA and Canada, MSI and XFX still allow owners of their cards to install aftermarket cooling solutions WITHOUT voiding the original manufacturer's warranty. (Both have supported doing so for many years.) Should the owner of an MSI or XFX card with an aftermarket cooler installed on it ever need service for that card, the original-equipment cooling solution must be reinstalled prior to returning it for service.
XFX offers a 2-year warranty on its regular R9-series cards, and a lifetime warranty on Black Edition cards. Meanwhile, MSI offers a 3-year warranty on all its R9-series cards. So should the owner of an MSI or XFX R9-290/290X card want to use the EK solution mentioned in the article, that owner would still be fully covered by the respective manufacturer's warranty.
Do you have links? I wish I'd known about MSI and XFX's exceptional policies, I would turn to them for more samples!
Actually AMD designs the cards, and TSMC manufactures the GPUs which the distributors, Sapphire included, buy the add their heatsinks and branding to.