Hey all:

I recently bought a new laptop. The specs are great, and I followed Knots' installation and modding guide at http://www.somethingfornobody.com/2011/morrowind-modding-guide/ and started playing, but noticed that my video card got REALLY hot pretty fast. I have a cooling pad, although it's not exactly hardcoe and I'm worried about my card overheating and ruining my laptop.

Here are the specs:
--Windows7 64-bit
--Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20 GhZ each
--8GM Ram
--NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560M (latest driver)

It's an Asus Republic of Gamers PC, one of the ones that's elevated because it supposedly has a cooling system built in (although I use a cooling pad anyway).

Here is what I currently have MGE XE configured to:

Resolution: 1920 x 1080; 16:9 aspect ratio
Windowed Mode
Default Refresh Rate
Vsyn is off
Antialiasing-->2x
Anisotropic Filtering->16x
Shaders Enabled
HDR reaction time = 2sec
HORZ FOV = 90
Fog Mode = vertex (best)
FPS limiter = 60
Mimap LOD bias = -1.0

Any tips/advice are very much appreciated, as I'm not really a hardware person. Thanks!!

Well, if you're very worried you could lower the resolution (although I imagine the GPU cycles it would free up would just go into increasing the FPS), disable your shaders and switch to a less demanding fog mode.

My Samsung's ATI card gets very hot, too, but the laptop's never shut down while playing Morrowind.