Fixing Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB thermal throttling in Outlaws?
It was brutal—my frames would suddenly plummet from 90 FPS down to 45 FPS while flying through space. Checking HWInfo, the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB core temps were swinging wildly between 82 - 88℃, triggering the PCIe 5.0 hardware thermal throttle. This caused my read bandwidth to crash from 10 GB/s to a miserable 3 GB/s. My first instinct was to drop the PCIe protocol to 4.0 in the BIOS; it cut temps by 10℃, but loading times nearly doubled, which felt like a huge step backward. Instead, I swapped in 1.5mm high-conductivity thermal pads and cranked my front case fans up to 1500 RPM. Under the same load, HWInfo showed temps settling between 55 - 62℃, and my frame times locked back into a stable 11 - 14 ms range. I actually messed up the second heatsink install by over-tightening the screw, which slightly warped the M.2 slot and made the drive disappear until I backed it off half a turn. Read/write speeds are now rock steady at 12000 MB/s. Stress tests confirm the throttling is gone.
