So I was just posting in another thread about a temp. issue I was having with ESO. The game was playing at about 80-85 C, both the CPU and GPU were running very hot.

***Just to be clear, this is NOT about that old loading screen bug where it makes your GPU run at 100% during loading screens. This is a totally different thing.

And I figured it out. It has nothing to do with my system or lack of air flow or proper cooling. I've got five case fans running along with the CPU and GPU fans, there's plenty of airflow. My PC is barely four months old and it's spotless inside, it is not because of my hardware. I'm running an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 and an AMD 2700X 8 core processor.

However, I also have an older monitor from about 2012, It's a 23" Samsung widescreen monitor which has a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. The reason I kept it so long is because it's a great monitor and has worked flawlessly for ten years. No reason to replace it until it finally breaks. And games look amazing on it.,

The temp. issue was happening because I had the ESO game resolution settings set at the max., 3840 x 2160 UHD. My monitor cannot render the game at that resolution. Well, to be more accurate, it CAN render the game but it makes the game run crazy hot and taxes the CPU and GPU fiercely.

Just to make sure my theory was correct, I checked the temps. right after I set the game resolution to 1920 x 1080 to match the monitor's resolution. Both the CPU and GPU IMMEDIATELY went down more than 20 degrees. I kept playing tor about a half hour to make sure it was holding steady. 30 minutes into playing, the temps. never got back out of the 60s C. They are still there now.

It can't be a coincidence after having the game run in the 80s C for several days it would suddenly drop that much in temperature right after I changed the game resolution.

Now the nice thing is that within the 1920 x 1080 resolution I can have all the ESO graphics settings maxed out completely and the game is running cool.

So basically what it boils down to is I'm playing games with what could be considered a "last gen" monitor since it doesn't support the latest 4K resolutions. But it's not like the game looks like crap in 1920 x 1080, it still looks amazing in the lower resolution. 1920 x 1080 is totally fine for a game like ESO. It's just not super duper resolution, but merely great resolution.

I realize that this might be like a "duh" to many of you and this is not new information at all. But I would guess that many players with newer graphics cards are assuming they can just run ESO at the highest resolution, and are not taking into account what the native resolution of their actual monitor might be!