I understand about Tom's being a big review site, and having better connections than the average lay person. My comment was solely in regards to this article. Sorry if I wasn't clear in that respect.
I highly suspect AMD may have made their changes in response to Tom's big clamor, but didn't work with Tom's in the process.
At 40 - 50% fan speed, I would agree with you about the reference cooler being insufficient. I take offense with Tom's not also benching the card with the cooler turned up to adequate speeds. When in the past has anybody else set an arbitrary limit on their fan speed and then complained their chip got too hot? Just because NVIDIA has a more elegant cooler design, doesn't mean AMD's cooler doesn't work. It's just a noisier solution, that's all. People can nit pick this all day long, but the cooler does work. I suspect Tom's hasn't shown any charts with the cooler running at adequate speeds, as there would be no controversial story to report then, other than the earplug ads that may start showing up along with the article. (-:
It only makes sense that the R9 290 and 290x run warmer than people are used to as they have more transistors than people are used to. A proportional increase in the fan speed to deal with the proportional increase in work being done by the chip, over the 7970 seems logical to me, since the fan is pretty much the same thing AMD has been using for a while.
Ultimately, the article highlights for me the differences in what you get from one manufacturer to the next. It's a great example, actually, in cost cutting by board partners effecting the final results a consumer will see. I think it's good that AMD allows the board partners to make their own decisions. It allows me as a consumer a wider selection of choices, whether I am more concerned about price or overall performance.