Air cooling has its advantages as well you know. My Nzxt Havik 140 can beat a lot of watercooling setups actually.
I've tried all those "heavy as a brick" coolers and nothing approaches the temp of a
real w/c setup. I'm not talking about Corsair H something (toy) or Swiftech kits. High end water with large radiators and industrial pumps. Had to, using several dual socket hex core Xeon systems overclocked to 4.8GHz with 1.35 Vcore. At full load (folding) with high end air (silver arrow) temps would hit over 90C and the system would lock up. On the current system at full load (WCG) temps run in the mid 40s. Water temp is the same as the room temp.
Bottom line is the heat pipes just don't have the capacity to effectively keep the bottom plate cool as it needs to be. If you're not pushing it as hard the temps will be much lower, but once you hit that critical point it takes off hockey stick all the way until the throttle kicks in or it crashes.
Once you go (real) water it's hard to go back especially on a system that needs wc. EVGA SR2 boards have a joke for onboard chipset cooling as well. I don't care for listening to fans roaring unless it's my whole house fan but that's more of a rumble than a hum.
Back to the topic of the 690 I wish they would stop bragging about the number of CUDA cores this thing has because the instructions per core is way down on this one. The 580/590 will blow it away if you intend to use prime grid GPU, for example.
If you like to blast away at games, currently the 690 is top dog, make no mistake about it. Even if the 7990 makes longer lines in the graphs I'm willing to bet the barn it will still "feel" much slower. Adaptive vsync FTW.