My Seagate FireCuda 540 2TB triggers thermal throttling during heavy combat in The Division, causing massive FPS drops. Fix?

Watching my frame rate tank from 120 down to 35 FPS was an absolute disaster; it felt like I was trying to walk through waist-deep mud. Looking at the telemetry, while the FireCuda 540's cache is great for response, the PCIe 4.0 power draw pushed core temps to a scorching 82-88℃, triggering a hard hardware throttle. I tried capping the interface to PCIe 3.0 in the BIOS, which dropped temps to 60℃ but slaughtered my load speeds by 40%—totally unacceptable. I ended up swapping in a 2.0mm high-conductivity thermal pad and locked my bottom chassis fans to 1800 RPM. HWInfo now shows the drive pinned between 62-67℃, and the drops are gone. I actually messed up the installation at first and slightly bent a pin on the connector, so the drive didn't post on the first boot, but a quick reseat fixed it. Sequential reads are now hitting 6500-7000MB/s. After a 4-hour stress test, the performance is rock solid and memory temps are sitting at 58-63℃.