Smokey...sorry I did not get a BF3 run done yet. I was testing a bunch of other stuff and doing some slight OC on the cards to see what I can get out of them first. Will still do it, but not till tonight.
Man these cards are pretty silent compared to my 580 Classy's. Even at normal use, I can barely hear them. It is not till they hit around 60% fan speed that I can hear a rise in noise, but no where near my classys or my original 580's.
For those that OC...the 680's bring a whole new way of doing it and while some may like it due to simplicity, others may not. And like usual, especially with reference cards, the GPU you get may not be the same as someone elses. Case in point, someone at evga has 2 in SLI like I do and he is able to get around 10fps higher than me because on his cards he is able to push the offset a bit higher than I can on mine...it is all luck of the draw until you get specialty GPU's which are binned.
But regardless, even without an OC, they are fantastic.
And as a side note..and I know that not everyone cares..but my barometer has always been Witcher 2 in Ubersampling at 1080p and everything maxed out...on my original 580's in SLI my best was around 20-25fps....with my Classy's my best was a 28-40fps...with the 680's I am between 45-60fps, with an average close to around 55fps or so in the scenes i tried. So, even with the might 680's in Ubermode, still cannot achieve rock solid 60fps in Witcher 2....whatcha think a 3rd card???
Lastly, since these are new cards, there is an issue with SLI and Witcher 2 in Uber...you get some nasty texture flickering...it is not on all textures, but a few, but very noticeable. I tried it without Uber and there is no flickering, so there is something going crazy when Uber mode is engaged.