How to stop heat saturation on the Noctua NH-D15S in Days Gone?
I thought buying the king of air coolers meant I was set for life, but after a three-hour marathon, my cores slowly climbed from 65°C to 84°C. This heat saturation caused my clocks to tank from 5.1GHz down to 4.2GHz. I tried forcing the fans to 1500 RPM, but the noise went up and the temps didn't budge—total frustration. I realized the case was just trapping hot air. I redesigned the airflow, set the front fans to a strong intake, and added a top exhaust to create a proper positive pressure environment. In HWMonitor, the CPU temp dropped back to 68-73°C and frame times tightened from 16-25ms to 11-14ms. I actually had one of the fans installed backward at first, which just swirled the hot air around inside the case like a convection oven. Once I flipped it, everything clicked. RAM stayed at 42-46°C and the GPU sat at 60-65°C. Switched to Performance Mode and it's rock steady at 58-63°C now.