A single 1080p monitor doesn’t appear to strain any of these cards using Far Cry 3’s High detail preset. Higher resolutions benefit from overclocking, but the load still appears too light to trigger throttling on the air-cooled card.

Anyone who believes they need at least 50 FPS at 5760x1080 will probably want to overclock. VisionTek's CryoVenom card overclocks better.

We hit the Ultra preset and 5760x1080 before the stock air-cooled card begins to stumble. That’s also where the overclocked water-cooled card excels.

Charting out frame rate over time shows that the stock card drops below 20 FPS during our benchmark. This game has always appeared a little choppy, even at higher frame rates. So we'll take whatever performance we can get in order to make Far Cry 3 a more enjoyable experience. We'd stick to the liquid-cooled CryoVenom at this specific setting.

- 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.