How to stop the MSI A520M-A PRO from rebooting under load?
About three hours into a session, the whole system would just black screen and reboot without warning, and it only got worse as my village grew. Checking the logs, the VRM on this MSI A520M-A PRO was hitting a scorching 95-105℃ under full CPU load, causing the Vcore to plummet by 0.1V. I tried enabling power-saving mode in the BIOS, which dropped the temp by 5 degrees but made the simulation crawl at a snail's pace—totally illogical and unusable. I eventually set a CPU voltage offset of -0.05V and rigged up a 40mm spot fan to blow directly onto the VRM heatsinks. Monitoring with HWInfo, the peak VRM temp crashed from 102℃ down to 78-84℃, and the random reboots stopped. I did hit a blue screen during the loading screen on my first try with the undervolt, so I had to back it off to -0.03V to find the sweet spot. CPU temps now hover between 68-75℃. After three hours of Prime95, the voltage is rock solid and RAM stays between 58-63℃.
