Our returns rate is less than 5%, same for a card like GTX 780, so I think that maybe the black screen issue is overly talked about but in reality can't be that bad when the statistics for returns seem pretty much around the same as other high-end cards from AMD and NVIDIA.
I don't think there is any issue with the reference board, I've got one in my home PC, I only get a black screen if I try to push the memory from its stock 5000Mhz to beyond 6200MHz, anything under 6200MHz and there is no issue. I've tested cards at OcUK upto 6600-6800MHz with no black screen issues. Several members of staff here have 290's in crossfire and tri-fire, again no black screen issues.
If there was a failure in the design we'd have a 100% return rate. So AMD's design seems perfectly fine and until more custom cards come out, there is nothing to say that cards not using AMD designs won't suffer the same black screens. What it could most likely be is the simple fact Hawaii is a brand new architecture and some of the game coders are still adapting their software to run properly on it, hence why we see both game patches and AMD software to address the issue. Which obviously has some truth to it as newer cards still using AMD reference design seem to be having less issues which is no doubt down too because new purchases are using new software, later AMD drivers, games already patched. But more importantly it was probably something to do with the BIOS on the cards.
My Asus 290X reference at home before would only benchmark upto 6200MHz and was only game stable and black screen free upto around 5800-6000MHz. Asus released a new BIOS and I can now game upto 6200MHz and benchmark upto 6500Mhz.
So I personally feel that the issue is a mix of BIOS not correctly optimised for the memory fitted to the cards and drivers/software patches not correctly optimised for Hawaii architecture.
