AMD should not have released the 290 series with that stupid blower of theirs. That is what it boils down to, AMD made a poor design decision by not investing more R+D into a better cooler and hence we have a situation now where reviews and users will bring it up as impacting the user experience.
But aren't you inserting your own conclusion here by calling AMD's decision wrong?
To me, it's a trade-off, achieve lower price by using lower priced cooler, get noisier card at lower price.
The issue would be when a reviewer asserts his own personal bias to characterize a given trade-off as unilaterally incorrect, when many readers of that review would just disagree.
This is the crux in my opinion, and I think it's why so many people are put off by the Anandtech review.
For one, the review seems to take a subjective impression, but tells us what is right or wrong for us as though it's objective truth. Like telling me it knows better than I do, and if I disagree I'm just wrong. I dunno, I've replaced the cooler on all my video cards, so I don't think I'm wrong for being OK with a stock cooler that is noisy, especially if I'm planning to replace it and that brings down the price of the card?
For another point, I think given the actual data, reasonable people could come to different conclusions, and good reviews will allow for that reasonable interpretation. Reviews will show people what they can expect from a product. A really good review will let a person imagine they themselves are sitting there testing and using the product, a nice effect where you get into the head of the reviewer and think yes, I'd test that and I'd try that too, go on...
But here, the review seemed to be about explaining why this card was a loser in the competition with another card, how it's the wrong choice and lost the competition. But how does that help me imagine how the product is? If I wanted to buy a car, I don't care how the car loses when compared against a Ferrari, because I'm not going to be racing against Ferraris, I'm going to be driving the car for myself.
This video card review seemed to focus on condemning the card for losing a battle, and missed the opportunity to focus on the features of the card itself.
Anyway, another thing is that if you read a review and see something odd stick out, why isn't that explained. We see very odd situation where the Nvidia cards behave strangely in SLI.
Yet no explanation. We are left to guess. Was the poor SLI showing because the 780 Ti is a slow card? Doubtful, but who knows, it's not discussed. Was it because Nvidia makes poor drivers? Doubtful, but who knows, it's not discussed.
Why didn't the review talk about that, to explain the odd behavior? I can't help but take away the impression that things aren't discussed if they deviate from the pre-selected narrative.
Here, explaining that the 290 outperforms the 780 Ti in dual-card mode might force the review to acknowledge that either the 780 Ti is not as good of a card, or Nvidia doesn't write good software. But that didn't seem to fit the narrative that the review was to select a winner card, instead of getting into explaining things.