How to fix AK620 Ice Cube thermal throttling in Frostpunk 2?
The frame rate would just dive from 75 FPS to 30 FPS, and it was a total disaster whenever the city simulation scaled up. Looking at the logs, the DeepCool AK620 Ice Cube was letting the core hover between 88-94°C, triggering aggressive thermal throttling. I tried lowering shadow quality in the settings, but the stuttering persisted—it was clearly a physical cooling failure. I ended up stripping the cooler and repasting it with a high-conductivity compound, then bumped the fan curve to 1600 RPM at 80°C. Monitoring via RTSS, my 1% lows jumped from 30 FPS to 58 FPS, and the frame time graph stopped looking like a mountain range. Interestingly, my first repaste attempt actually raised temps by 2°C because of uneven mounting pressure; I had to redo the screws in a strict diagonal pattern to get it right. Now the CPU sits comfortably at 70-76°C. A 3DMark stress test confirms the throttling is gone, and VRM/memory temps are steady at 58-63°C.
