Did AMD get this wrong, Yes, but not for the reasons that everybody thinks.
First up this cooler issue, is it up to the job?
Well the general consensus would be no it isn’t, I mean how often do shops offer a new launch card with the choice of an aftermarket air cooler. To be honest we won’t really know how good/bad the stock cooler is until we see cards with non stock coolers.
Now in my opinion the biggest issue is one that has only briefly been touched upon.
Clock speed. How can AMD think it is alright to sell a card that advertised as up to 1000MHz, in fact I have spent most of the last hour looking at various vendors and I am yet to find one that one that has the 290X advertised as up to 1000MHz, they all have them as 1000MHz. Which is something that AMD should clamp down on; if they insist on advertising up to 1000MHz then they should make sure that vendors do the same.
Even if people think that ‘up to’ is acceptable, just think back to the whole broadband issue.
Imagine if you bought a 4 pack of mars bars and it only had 3 in it, would you just shrug it off or would you take it back and complain?
Before anyone says that the Nvidia cards also throttle, yes they do but have you looked at the figures, first off Nvidia advertise the 780ti cards as 876MHz with a boost of 928MHz, rather than an up to figure and secondly having looked at the reviews we see that the nvidia 780ti does indeed throttle but not below the 928MHz mark which is how it is advertised as shown here. (I’m not counting the furmark result as most would agree that is not real world usage)
Here you have the R9 290X clock speeds just for comparison, as you can see it only reaches speeds well below the advertised 1000MHz in most cases.
I just really hope this doesn’t catch on and become the normal way of advertising.