How to fix ARK 2 loading stutters on ASRock H310CM-HDV?

I was so excited to run ARK 2 on an old motherboard! But when loading giant dinosaur herds, the PCIe link lagged between 20-40ms, causing severe stutters. I first tried disabling all power-saving options in the BIOS, but the CPU hit 95℃ per AIDA64 and the system rebooted. I then used the GamePP Power Plan Switcher to lock High Performance mode and set disk I/O priority to maximum. CrystalDiskMark showed random read response dropped to 18ms, and memory stabilized at 14-18GB per HWiNFO64.