Can I stop my ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 from overheating in Alan Wake 2?
Trying to run a next-gen beast like Alan Wake 2 on an A320 budget board is basically like trying to tow a shipping container with an electric scooter—it's just absurd. Once I turned on Ray Tracing, the VRM power stages rocketed to 105-110℃, triggering the hardware protection and crashing the game to desktop without warning. I tried adding an extra fan to the top of the case, but it only dropped the temps by 3℃, which was honestly laughable. I had to go into the BIOS and hard-cap the CPU PPT power limit to 65W and enable low-voltage mode. With HWInfo monitoring, the VRM temps were finally pinned between 82-88℃, and the crashes stopped entirely. The trade-off was a roughly 5% dip in single-core performance and an extra 10 seconds on loading screens, but hey, at least the game is playable now. CPU cores stayed around 68-75℃. I exported all the crash logs from Windows Event Viewer to confirm the stability, with fans humming steadily at 1400-1600RPM.
