Strange but smart move from AMD from a marketing stand point. However, I am starting to think by AMD launching cards this way, we could see the end of tradition game testing.
AMD cards are the opposite of Nvidia's where they guarantee a minimum level of performance by ensuring a minimum base clocks that closer to real clocks. AMD reviews advertise a maximum or at least above average level of performance out of the box and the noise levels are too much you lower the fan profile yourself. However unless your like Anandtech and mention how much the performance drops with slower fan profiles, you don't know how much performance you will lose by lower your fan profile(a drop of 7% fan speed led to a drop of 12% in performance). In addition, many of the test benches I saw used open cases which are sure to help a card the relys on cool air coming in for its performance.
If AMD continues to release the cards at loudest setting possible(not talking about 100% fan speed, but 2.5DB louder than a gtx 480 is loud) and basically leave it to people to reduce the fan profiles themselves, people will need to know even more(see the card in person) to see if the person could deal with the noise or actually know how much performance drops from lowering fan profile. People might not think a little drop in profile might not means much of a deviation from game performance from reviews but as anandtech showed.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7481/t...-290-review/15
A 7% change in fan profile can lead to up to a 30% decrease in GPU frequency in certain games. Also by clocking cards closer to the limit without, knowing overclocking limits of a card become even more important now.
If people continue to not care about noise because they only look for performance, it basically encourage AMD to continue to put crappy coolers on their cards and additionally, clocks their cards as high as they can and let people gamble with noise and performance themselves. I mention gamble because unless reviews test for it, they don't know how much of a drop they will see.
Reviewers will have to change their testing methodology to ensure consumers know what they are getting(in addition all reviewers need to be testing in cases now). The performance of 290 series in general can vary too much(30% difference in clocks).
The r9-290 great performance per dollar, but its a really a test for consumers. In its traditional state which was default 40% fan profile and 12 percent slower, it still would have been a good value for the dollar, but putting noise on the line, AMD is seeing if people want performance more than noise.
If AMD is successful with this, I expect to see the same with Nvidia where we see them clock their cards much higher, give a higher fan profile and throw noise out the window and leave decreasing noise to the consumer.
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