To me the GeForce GTX 470 feels like a much better product than the GTX 480. It offers plenty of performance for all modern games, yet neither breaks the bank nor turns your room into a sauna during gaming. It seems a bit to me that GTX 470 was the intended target of NVIDIA when they were working on Fermi. The card idles at reasonable 29W which is about the same as the last generation GT200 series. Once you start gaming, power consumption increases, but stays well below 200W at all times, only Furmark brought the card to 232W. These numbers result in a performance per Watt score that sits right in the middle of our test group - which is dominated by ATI's new HD 5000 products. The thermal characteristics of the card are acceptable with idle below 50°C, and load slightly above 90°C. It most certainly looks like NVIDIA did the best they could for fan noise given the power consumption and capabilities of the heatsink. Unfortunately this means that the card is far from quiet under load, again, nowhere near some Radeon HD 5870 cards, for example from PowerColor or ASUS.
Compared to the GTX 480 we saw some pretty nice overclocking potential on the ASUS GTX 470. It seems that all Fermi GPUs hit about the same clock range, no matter whether they are on a GTX 480 or GTX 470. This means that if you are willing to do some manual tweaking and overclocking, you could most probably reach performance levels of the HD 5870 or GTX 480, at a substantially lower price.
Right now it seems that stock of the GTX 470 or GTX 480 is nowhere to be seen, even though e-tailers expect more stock each single day.