Power, temps and noise
In-game temperature is more than acceptable for an ultra-enthusiast card.
We use Batman: Arkham City as our power-draw test. It produces excellent, repeatable results for single-GPU cards. Our numbers show a single GTX 690 pulls around 70W less than two GTX 680 cards that provide about the same performance. The Radeon numbers are low because CrossFireX doesn't work as well as anticipated in this title. Providing more context, power-draw in Total War: Shogun 2 is 310W for the GTX 690, 392W for the GTX 680 SLI and 440W for the twin Radeon HD 7970s.
GTX 690 is quieter than any other dual-GPU graphics card in Batman: Arkham City. Swap over to Total War: Shogun 2 and the 690's noise inches up to 42.9dB, GTX 680 SLI's to 45.8dB and Radeon HD 7970 XF's to 47.8dB. We'd go far as to say it's surprisingly quiet for such a high-end card.
