I looked at Newegg, for Gigabyte and Powercolor, neither of which are very good companies to buy GPUs from, had several people with issues higher than average. Anything from any other company is pretty much either DOA and had very very few problems in addition to DOA.
For Nvidia, I looked at 770, 780, and 780Ti. While the 770 and 780 had little issue, the 780Ti has a lot of negative feedback too. Does that make the 780Ti a bad card? No, cause the cards that are reviewed really low are Powercolor and Gigabyte again with pretty much the same coolers than the R9 290(x) cards have with negative reviews. Anything from AMD from Sapphire, MSI, Asus, HIS, etc. have all 4 or 5 eggs with no problems outside of occasional DOAs, which happens to everyone occasionally.
For looking up bias if its really necessary:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias
Definition 3, B
"an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice"
You have a personal, and unreasoned judgment that the AMD Hawaii based GPUs are garbage despite the fact for the vast majority of people who own one bought from a better company than Powercolor and Gigabyte have had no problems and find the card works perfectly for them.
K, after this post I'm just going to agree to disagree because my opinion on the subject is not changing regardless of your imagination that the 290 and 290x have a defect-ratio that is within reasonable levels. That said, the following is copy/pasted from newegg.com unedited:
SAPPHIRE TRI-X OC 100361-2SR Radeon R9 290X :
1.Cons: This card did not work for more than 2 weeks.
2.Cons: Card failed just under two months. Seems everyone is having this failure. You have been warned.
3.Cons: Black Screens galore, worked ok for about 2 weeks, then started to get black screens, now just a bunch of black screens, stay away from this thing until AMD figures out how to write a graphics driver.
4.Cons: The two eggs off in NO WAY reflect on Sapphire or New Egg who have both been superb in their quality of service but rather in AMD who have been horrible.
This is my 4th physical R9 290X card and my second Sapphire one. the first 3 where ALL bad. The last one finally worked. As I tried to troubleshoot the other 3 cards I discovered thousands of people were having the same black screen issues.
5.Pros: ** NOTHING.
Please google search R9 290x before you buy this card.
BLACK SCREEN which will not post to BIOS is a common problem
Cons: This card will not post even to bios. I've spent 8 hours trying to make this work.
1. Different PSU's will not work, including a 1050w PSU, 850w PSU and a 750w PSU.
2. This card does not work in other systems, even with lower PCIE 2.0
3. This card does not work in PCIE3.0
4. Does not work with Maximus hero 7.
5. This card sucks.
I guess Sapphire is not so good either.
ASUS R9290X-DC2OC-4GD5 Radeon R9 290X 4GB :
1.Cons: - Can get pretty hot
- Seem to have QA issues with cards being DOA or die within a few weeks
2.Cons: When I initially bought this card to replace my 7950, I kept having issues with black screen/video drivers crashing. I put my 7950 back in and had no issues, and RMA'd it off to Asus. Asus's RMA didn't take too long, but when I got the card back it was now causing BSOD, in the 2 weeks it was away my 7950 never caused me any of these issues. Before and after I RMA'd the card, I read up on the web I saw a bunch of 290x/290 users all having the same issues with various solutions(There's a 127 page thread on overclockers about the black screen issue), but honestly you shouldn't be having this many issues with a graphics card, it should just work. Extremely disappointed, I went from 6970->7950->290x, but I'm going to break my AMD streak and probably go with Nvidia for my next card.
3.Cons: Almost instantly of being under video heavy strain it turns into an oven. It reached temperatures of ~120-130 degrees Fahrenheit on a very well ventilated box.
4.Cons: Gone through two cards and they're both bad. Stock is OC'd and it's not stable at all. Frequent crashes from too much heat.
5.Cons: Upon arrival, it would crash and BSOD immediately when in crossfire with bezel correction enabled. It took ASUS about a week to determine that it was defective, I returned it and it took another month for them to determine that the replacement was also defective.
6.Cons: Card Failure
7.Cons: I purchased two of these on 3/13/2014 from newegg. They are now both dead. There is no cooling provided to the VRAM chips on the boards. I religiously monitored temps under load - GPU and VRM temps never exceeded 85C. Cards were never overclocked. First card failed at 29 days - dead short. Second card is now artifacting and has wide pink vertical stripe in output (4/25 - prompted this review). Thermal paste was completely dry and GPU cooler did not have full contact with GPU. As an engineer, I believe that this card/cooler design is flawed. I have two reference Sapphire R9 290s with aftermarket Accelero Hybrid coolers that outperform this design (at a higher cost). If I ever get two functional cards back for crossfire, it is my intention to liquid cool them as well as putting heat sinks on the VRAM chips. The R9 series runs too hot (85C) even with a Direct CU 2 cooler.
Et tu , Asus?
I could go on but I won't - it's taking up a lot of space and honestly it's entirely redundant. I said it before but it flew over your head the first time so I'll say it again emphatically :
The defects are traversing AIB's , the problem is HAWAII
The issues with any GK110 or GK104 powered board are minuscule in comparison and more often than not they are related to manufacturing errors in the HeatSink&Fan , i.e, squeaky/wobbly fan.