Why is my Thermalright PA120 SE White struggling with temps?
While speeding through the city, my CPU temps shot from 62℃ to 91℃ in a heartbeat, tanking my clock speeds from 5.1GHz down to 3.4GHz. It felt like the game was running through mud. The stock fan curve on the Thermalright PA120 SE White is way too conservative, idling around 900 RPM until it hits 80℃. I tried switching to the High Performance power plan in Windows, but that just pushed it into the thermal wall faster—a total waste of time. I eventually dove into the BIOS and manually mapped the PWM curve, cranking the fans to 1700 RPM the moment it hits 75℃ and dropping the fan step-up time to 0.1 seconds. In AIDA64 stress tests, peak temps dropped from 93℃ to a manageable 77-83℃, and the throttling completely vanished. The noise was unbearable at first, but I balanced it out by dropping speeds below 60℃ to 700 RPM. With the CPU sitting at 75% load, frame times finally leveled out between 5.1-6.4ms.