More out of curiosity than anything I was checking to see what temperature and what fan speed percentage my gpu was running at while playing Morrowind. For the record it's an Nvidia 670 2gb that when idle runs at 10% fan speed and 25°C - 30°C. Running heavily modded versions of Quake that can noticeably dent frames per second it tends to run at 50°C - 60°C, Skyrim around 50°C - 60°C, the rather demanding Cinematic Mod for Half-Life 2 is around 55°C and these are with the fan going at most 20% - 30%.

Now playing Morrowind - heavily modded it makes a beeline for 70°C + and ramps up to 40% fan speed.

Are other players finding that Morrowind drives the temperature of their gpu's up also?

What software do you use to measure the temperature of your gpu and others? I was using HWMonitor but it doesn't seem to recognise all the hardware of my computer (Windows 8).

Sorry, I just had to update HWMonitor to get it right. I don't play a heavyly modded Morrowind so I suppose that I won't have overheating. If you use many graphics mods, this is probably the reason of the temperatures you are noticing.

Vanilla Morrowind doesn't really require much in the manner of graphics. On my setup is roughly 25% GPU utilization (60C or +15C idle), whereas other for modern games hover in the 80-100% range (70-90C). Morrowind is using a engine based on DirectX 8.1 (well only one DIrectX 8.1 feature, water pixel shading). It is possibly that the mods that you are using aren't very efficient, but 70C isn't very hot.

Unless you find that your graphics card's fan is very noisy then I would recommend setting it for 50% static fan speed. IMO, the constant fan speed changes are more annoying then a higher idle/moderate load fan speed of 50%. (~2650 RPM, in my case). The fan will still increase beyond 50% if needed.

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Most modern graphics card can run up to 100C before having issues. They will cause a reboot in the 105-110C range though.

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BTW. My measurements are from AIDA64 (Logitech G15 keyboard LCD plugin) updated every 2 seconds.

Played one hour and got a maximum gpu temperature of 56 ° C. I haven't noticed the fans starting though so I suppose the temperature was okay.