How to stop Hellblade 2 from crashing on an old Z370M Pro4?

The framerate was bouncing between 60 and 30 FPS, which is a total nightmare for a cinematic game. After digging into the logs, I found the ASRock Z370M Pro4's VRMs were struggling with modern power spikes, causing a 0.08V drop that triggered a CPU safety shutdown. I tried lowering the graphics to medium, which added about 10 FPS, but the random crashes kept happening—it was incredibly frustrating. I eventually went into the BIOS, switched the CPU voltage to Manual, and added a +0.05V offset while disabling C-States to kill that wake-up lag. Monitoring via RTSS, the frame time graph went from a jagged mess to a nearly flat line between 16.5-18.2ms. I did hit a wall early on where the PC black-screened upon launching the game, but dialing the voltage back to 1.1V and cranking the fans fixed it. CPU temps now sit around 75-82℃ with VRMs at 68-74℃. OCCT ran for two hours without a single error, and RAM stayed at 58-63℃.
Category:Troubleshooting Last updated:March 8, 2026 7:32 PM