RX 480 has faster (8000 Mhz effective) but narrower (256 bit) memory than the R9 290 and R9 390 that gives it overall slightly better memory bandwidth than the R9 290 (5000 Mhz effective at 384 bit) but slightly worse than the R9 390 (6000 effective Mhz at 384 bit).
The RX 480 has 12.5% MORE compute cores (2304 vs. 2048 for exactly a 9:8 ratio) at quite a bit HIGHER clock rate than the R9 390 and even more so than the R9 290.
RX 480 and R9 390 are both PCI-E 3.0 cards, R9 290 is only PCI-E 2.0, but that has little or no measurable effect on most mining.
The RX 480 is NOT "close or a bit less than a R9 290" but in fact is a superior card across the board except ONLY for memory bus width
Might also want to pay attention to the R9 290x vs the R9 290 as they have the same memory system but the 290x has the same 2304 cores that the RX 480 does

He's gonna need some ice for that burn. Good job fact-checking.
What burn, that GPU-Z image just proves my stated facts about it.
If you're talking about the "listed" memory speed vs my stated EFFECTIVE memory speed, keep in mind that GDDR 5 can transfer 4 bytes per bus cycle - on raw clocks the R9 290 and 290x run at 1250 vs the 2000 for the RX 480, so same ratio as I stated.
I'm not discussing overclocked efforts, or it would be even worse - the RX 480 has demonstrated a LOT more overclock headroom than any R9 2xx series managed.
Too bad the other 2 links appear to be broken, would be interesting to see what they were about.
I don't need GPU-Z images for the R9 290 or R9 290x though when I have several of the first one and one of the second one and have worked with them quite a bit and have the bloody specs on them memorised.
Basic google searches disprove the majority of what you're talking about, including performance (cores can't be compared across generations of cards or chip makers). I pointed out performance and the memory bus width as that was off the top of my head. Your memory is corrupt.