Did anyone think that retrofitting such a cooler on stock 290x would increase its price by ~50$ & also it'd undercut AMD's partners thereby possibly undermining their ability to potentially differentiate the said products(on this very basis) eventually leading to a less than spectacular sales for them? I mean AMD could well be looking out for their partners unlike Nvidia which is closer to Intel in this regard!
I think the 290X is a pretty great card in terms of performance you get the buck. The performance for 550$ is nothing short of outstanding, i've said this several times.
Yet I'm not so sure i'd agree with you - as far as I can tell, folks can nitpick at the power consumption but when you're eyeing a high end card a lot of people don't care about that. A lot of people do care about noise, though, and AMD could have prevented any criticism about that entirely with an improved reference cooler. But they didn't do that. It's the same or worse than the same ref cooler used since the 5870.
I also think aftermarket cards have value - despite the Titan shroud being really good, aftermarket cards still sell very well due to better thermals, better overclocking, and better noise output - even the best reference cooler doesn't hold a candle to aftermarket by those metrics. So aftermarket cards still have an audience even IF the reference shroud is very high quality. So I guess my point is, I *still* think the 290X is a great card for the money, as I said the performance is outstanding. By the same token, though, I wish they had made a better reference cooler. Judging by other reactions, the noise output is the exact same as the 6970 and 7970 reference shrouds. Come on. AMD has been using the same shroud with updated external aesthetics for like 4 years now - under the hood they're all exactly the same. Stupid. It's time for them to update it and get something better. This doesn't detract from the performance of the 290X which really is great, but they could have offset the main detraction of the card -- noise -- completely. Yet they didn't. I think aftermarket cards will fix this issue easily enough, hopefully they get here relatively soon.
Even though the noise issue is the main detraction of the card, one aspect i'm enjoying is that NV has definitely taken notice and the competition has went up a notch. Nvidia released the 3 game holiday bundle, is dropping GTX 700 prices next month, and is releasing a new SKU BECAUSE of the 290X. And who can complain about that? Unless they're a stockholder or something along those lines. I think that's great - the 290X is apparently selling pretty well despite the flaw, and this has caused nvidia to react. So the end result is, everyone -- NV and AMD fans alike - have benefited from this. Yes, it's a flawed product, it's basically AMD's Fermi. That isn't necessarily a bad thing to everyone, as the card still has value in terms of incredible performance.
Personally, i'm eagerly waiting to see what NV does in terms of vanilla 780 price drops. As I said I'm really enjoying the competition aspect - despite the flaw of the 290X, it's selling pretty well from what i've seen and NV is definitely responding to the 290X in kind next month. And that's pretty awesome from a consumer perspective IMHO.
