I've been thinking about posting this for a few days now but wasn't sure where to do it or if it was even worth it. I'll plop the info here in case it's useful for anyone with old tech like mine.
The only way I can play CO and STO on max settings in summer without video card fans trying to thrust my case into space is to throttle my FPS down to a respectable 60 in Advanced Options for video. There's very little visual difference and I can still leave everything on Max.
STO and CO also seem to have a way of ... resetting my graphics quality occasionally. I noticed it recently in CO when I did my Winter flipping off of FPS throttling. All I did was move the quality settings slider down, and back up to max, then remove Comic Book Outlining, and voila, superior video quality. again.
*shrug*
Maybe this helps someone, probably not. But there ya go and now it's out of my head : )
