Fermi noise and heat - I have tried this card in two different systems and there is a massive difference between the two. When the 480 was placed in my large pc case which has really good cooling noise levels and temps were fine for gaming. It was no different to any other card and much better than my 4870x2 in terms of heat and noise.
Now I have the 480 in my htpc case which is basically setup for water cooling and only has 2 x 80mm exit fans and a newly added 1 x 92mm fan at the front. My case is sat in a semi enclosed av rack with poor airflow to the back and side of the case. Things are allot different in the htpc case. Idle temps are about 8-10c more in this htpc case and the fan after a while of gaming does get fairly loud, unlike it does in my tower case.
The fan profile is also really screwed on this card. After a period of benching or gaming the temps of course rises as does the noise of the fan. However the 480 leaves it too long before the fan spins up so the card gets hot then the fan tries to bring the temps down which brings in the noise. If the fan spun up earlier it wouldn't need to spin up as much later on to bring the temp down. Another screwed up thing about the fan profile is that as soon as the gpu load drops down so does the fan speed. What would be far better is if they kept the fan speed up for say 20 sec after the gpu load had dropped to cool the card down first. If the idle temps are say 50c and your load temps are 80c and you stop gaming it takes ages for the card to cool back down to 50c. As soon as you stop gaming the fan will ramp down and leave the gpu temp at 70c and it will take about 10 mins to get it back down to 50c. I have never seen this before in any cpu or gpu. I think the fan profile needs looking at and revising.
I think this card will act just like any other card in terms of noise and heat if you have decent air cooling setup in your case. If you dont have decent cooling in your case then things will get a bit nosier.
Ok enough on heat, noise and cooling as I will watercooling this card its not really a concern for me but I thought would share my thoughts on it.
Overscan - One thing I have always thought that ATI did better was overscan. My tv has about 4% overscan lock on which I cant remove so I need to use the overscan features on my card. This is easy with the ATI catalyst as its just one slider. With nvidia I have two sliders and its a bit more of a pain as the silders arent locked which is a stupid idea really.
Now with ATI when I game the overscan is removed and I just loose 4% off the edge of the screen. The game still plays in 1920x1080, the same happens with movies. Not with the nvidia card. I get a weird res showing which at the moment is 1832x1022. This appears on my desktop and in gaming. I am not too happy about this really but at least everything is on the screen. I havent tried any movies to see if this weird res is applied.