Blowers get overwhelmed once you cross the 150-200w load barrier.
It's easily seen on the GTX680/770 and 780Ti, GTX980 and 980Ti, the blower can cope with the load in the midrange chips (little to no throttling), yet once you get to the big high end chips.. throttling, and lots of it unless you crank up fan speed to compensate. That's even considering the big chips have fancy vapor chamber heatsinks.
GTX1070 and 1080 although being mid range xx4 chips, this time are nearer the 200w mark than 150w, and it shows in the FE reviews, a few minutes in and they can't keep clocks high unless you crank up fan speed. This wouldn't be a problem if nV hadn't tried to scam people out of $100 for a subpar cooling solution for the chip they'd designed. Blowers are nice, yeah, but 1080 level cards are at a blower's limits. If you want perfect 10/10 cooling performance at that kind of thermal load and silent noise levels, you've got to move on to an open air cooler. No way around it.
Reference 290/x is what happens when you try to deal with a 250-300w load at reasonable noise levels with a blower (40% fan speed, not uber 55% mode) even taking into account the sky high 95°C throttling point.
Yes, the RX480 is a $200-230 card that includes a blower designed to hit that budget. The heatsink looks basic and doesn't have the fancy vapor chamber or heatpipes higher end blowers have, but then you're dealing with a 75-110w load here depending on the game or application. We've seen the 150w wall with Furmark. It's well within the comfortable range for a blower to keep the card cool at quiet noise levels and usual temperature range for stock cards (75-82°C) at stock clock speeds. Just what the mass market needs, not many people overclock.
So, no. No chance of this being another 290x situation. The thermal load P10 poses isn't even a challenge for a basic blower. Now if this were the RX 490 and a 250-300w TDP card at that, and used a blower.. then yeah, there you have reasons to think of another disaster waiting to happen in the reviews.
AIB boards with overbuilt VRMs designed for more than a 150w hard wall and open air coolers are probably going to have P10 in the 6x°C load range at near silent fan speeds, offering lots of headroom for overclocking.