Remembering that my lab's low ambient temperatures give the air-cooled card a best-case environment, VisionTek's CryoVenom R9 290 continues to lead at the same clock rates.

With both cards overclocked, the water-cooled CryoVenom even manages to trump the retail Sapphire board's optimized fan settings.

I might have expected water cooling to give VisionTek's offering an advantage using Tomb Raider's Ultimate quality preset, but the lead instead remains constant.

F1 2012's High quality setting presents too light of a load for the fastest graphics cards.

The more strenuous workload of a multi-monitor configuration starts weighing on both cards once we dial in this title's Ultra detail preset. They boast the same GPU, and the most effective cooling solution (water) wins.
- 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.