"Perfectly fine" is a lot more inclusive than "excellent" and "outstanding piece of equipment". I don't have a decades worth of data in my head but the phrase "quiet cooling" as applied to AMD reference cards is not something I have often seen.
I just dislike loud cards because they clutter up the market. I really don't understand why that is so difficult to fathom, and also I don't understand why AMD has such a hard time designing properly good cooling. Sometimes it happens, but it seems to me they for quite a while now has used exactly the same design for many of their cards and all of those are loud.
Well nobody said anything about quiet, by perfectly find I mean, you put it in a system and it will work at stock speeds without overheating, aka it just works, and they have fitted that role.
But what Nvidia cards then have fit that bill according to you?
The 8800GTX? 8800GT? 9800GT? GTX280? GTX480? GTX580? you tell me which one of those had a stock cooler (all blowers) that were cooling so fantastic and did so while remaining noticebly more quiet then AMD cards of the time.
Also you dont dislike loud cards because they clutter up the market, that makes no sense, you hate them for being loud, not for there being a bunch of them.
I agree that the RX480 and some others had just simply cheaply done base cooling, I would imagine this was part of trying to sell the cards at that low low MSRP which sadly never came to pass.
Now with these new cards, is this not just something that happens every now and then? on BOTH sides?
A card gets released and is exclusively stock cooler for all manufactuers for a while, before they get/have the freedom to make some custom models?