I currently am running an nvidia 6800 and upon checking the temperature of my card(via the nvidia control panel) the average temperature for my card seems to be dangling around 40-50 degrees Celsius, im no mathematician but that translates to a range of roughly 100-120 degrees fareghheight, I'm not sure what temperature a graphics card is supposed to be idling at, but that seems extremely high for plastic components to be bearing, so tell me is this normal or not?

Silicon actually - plastic would be quite worthless for making chips of any kind, and they can bear much more than you'd expect. ;)

In a room with normal temps (not kept like a refrigerator) with an average air-cooled system, you'll rarely see temps lower than mid-40s C, and GPUs almost always run hotter than the other system components. At idle my own comp (in a fairly warm room) has temps of
CPU: Upper 30s C - with Cool&Quiet enabled, and a fairly extreme air cooled HSF
System: Low 40s C
GPU: Mid 50s C

Temps go up quite a bit under load, however my CPU has a core threshold of 71C, and my GPU a threshold of 115C.

Don't worry, 40-50 is fine. Keep in mind that these are idle temps, if you have something measure them while you're playing a game, they could be up in the 70s.

I am running a Radeon ATI X1950 Pro, PCIe card. When it gets too hot my system warns me about it, and also slows the processor down. Since I am usually running a game when it does that, I usually exit and shut my computer down for a little bit to let it cool off.

I am running a Radeon ATI X1950 Pro, PCIe card. When it gets too hot my system warns me about it, and also slows the processor down. Since I am usually running a game when it does that, I usually exit and shut my computer down for a little bit to let it cool off.
Pentium4 CPUs will throttle down if they begin to overheat - in theory it's impossible to burn one up. I'm not sure if Intel carried that feature over to the Core2 series or not, but AFAIK no other CPUs or and no video cards throttle on overheat.

Mine idles at a core temp of 55°C. It has an alarm temperature of 127°C.

Crap.....well....this is bad then I guess overheat isnt my problem then......