Now you can buy a Radeon R9 280X, 270X, or 270 from Gigabyte with BF4 included.
Gigabyte Releases Three R9 200 Series BF4-Edition Cards : Read more
Gigabyte Releases Three R9 200 Series BF4-Edition Cards : Read more
I beleive there is a slight design change; if you read Toms article when they installed the Accelero3 it fit reasonably well, not perfect. Also the R9 uses more ram chips so I'm sure manufacturers ahd to re-do contracts with suppliers, undergo testing/qualifying... which is why there were only reference designs on launch.I think people saw how fast the coolers for the 280X came out and thought the 290/290X would be just as fast. I think people forget the 280X is just a rebranded 7970 so they already had after market coolers designed for the PCB and core.