Case closed for me
Case closed for me. Both my vendor and Gigabyte itself say "we can't do anything more". Gigabyte offered me a 570OC which I finally declined. My vendor offered me a refund but I also declined since I bought this card on special offer (324 euros) so there is no case that I will find anything near-decent to 480SOC with this amount of money.
So, I currently have my 2nd replacement, it works fine over-volted @ 1.088v (finished 3 games already all maxxed no prob.) and this is it. Idles at 60o C (dual monitor setup), tops @ 84oC under full load (games). Some could say, "why moaning, you're ok". Well, this is not exactly so. With this voltage, I could have overclocked as well, but I'm using all this voltage just to operate the stock specs... I get BSOD and artifacts even to my slightest attempt to mess with the clocks, even in 0.10 increments.
FYI, Gigabyte won't issue any BIOS update. They say that our problems reflect a minority of users, most of them are ok, so they don't want to issue an update that may mess the "well-being" of the majority of 480soc owners.
They even asked for my VGA Lot number (its a green sticker on the back of the card). Don't know why. They also sent me an excel table showing that the gtx570oc performs a bit more than 480soc (they only provided a 3d vantage score)...
Anyway, this all has been extremely tedious and tiresome experience. The actual offer price of my card vanished by the extra cost of numerous phone calls, here and there.
Wish you luck (=at least a decent/playable/working stable setting). Next time, I know...