When the Nvidia GTX-480 hit the shelves we saw a lot of sites reporting what we considered high temperatures on the GPU. A lot of those sites were relying on Furmark and chose not to game for hours on end in a variety of games and get thermal readings that way. We can understand the initial rush to publish because in reviewing it's publish now or suffer a loss of traffic on the review or article.We can't understand not going back and studying the thermal envelope of the GTX-480 after the initial reviews. So we fired up the GTX-480 and gamed for days on end (a dirty job but someone had to do it). Each game we ran we gamed for hours and hours then dropped out and took temperature readings. Each benchmark we used we ran multiple benchmarks back to back and dropped out and took readings. In all we spent 3 weeks gaming, taking thermal readings, and checking ambient temperatures to ensure continuity of testing.Sometimes you start into a review and it looks, on the surface, to be an easy one. Then later you realize that you just let yourself in for a few weeks of rigorous testing and easy left the room about the time you fired up the rig. This is one of those cases. What we boil down to a screenshot of GPU-Z ended up being 3 gaming sessions lasting hours, then pulling the median thermal reading.Before we get into all that lets rehash a little GTX-480 info.