Is there really any good reasons or toughs on why vendors such as xfx and others have not changed the overall design of their adaptations of the cooling solution of the reference r9 290 and 290x cards
Im sure im not the only one thinking this and im sure im going to get flamed for asking this but genuinely Im looking for a definitive answer
They aren't allowed to yet, aftermarket coolers will likely be released early next year. I'm not convinced restricting to stock designs for the first couple of months of sales was perhaps the best marketing strategy, but I'm no expert, perhaps it was good for sales/profits?
I suspect aftermarket coolers could have a pretty major effect on performance with the 290 series, given their strategy regarding temperatures and clock speeds.
It's possible AMD wanted their reference 290s to sell, already competitive with Nvidia's top-of-the-market cards (1% behind a stock 780ti when in uber mode), and then the reference designs come out and gain another ~10% performance advantage over even those. It's almost like a whole new GPU coming out. Almost.
It's possible.