My Samsung 9100 PRO with heatsink keeps triggering thermal throttling during fast travel. Why?

While swinging through Manhattan at top speed, I hit these annoying micro-freezes that lasted a fraction of a second, making me seriously question if PCIe 5.0 is actually worth the hype. I dug into the telemetry and found the Samsung 9100 PRO controller was spiking between 78-84℃ during massive asset streams, triggering a hardware-level thermal throttle that tanked my read speeds from 12000MB/s down to around 3500MB/s. I first tried forcing the M.2 slot to Gen 5 in the BIOS, but that just made the temperature swings more violent and actually increased the frequency of frame drops—a total fail. I eventually updated to the latest Samsung NVMe drivers, set the disk power state to High Performance in Windows, and added a dedicated airflow fan blowing directly on the drive. Monitoring via CrystalDiskInfo showed the core temps stabilized between 62-68℃, and the loading smoothness improved drastically. I even tried dropping the link to Gen 4 to cool it down, but that added 4 seconds to my load times, so the airflow fix was the only real way out. Frame times are now rock steady at 5.1-6.4ms.