Fixing Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB overheating in Elden Ring
The visuals in Shadow of the Erdtree are absolutely breathtaking, but the hardware struggle was real. The PCIe 5.0 speeds on the 9100 PRO are insane, but when streaming 20GB+ of assets, the drive shot up to 82-88℃, triggering a hard thermal throttle that crashed my FPS from 60 down to 32. I tried the power-saving mode in the driver, which dropped the temp by 5℃ but doubled the loading times—completely unacceptable. I ended up tweaking my bottom case fan curves to blast air directly onto the M.2 heatsink and updated the firmware via Samsung Magician. Now, read speeds are locked above 11000MB/s and temps are held at 62-68℃. I had some annoying resonance noise after the fan tweak, but locking them at 1800 RPM fixed the hum. The transition between game areas is finally seamless, and the SSD stays cool at 62-68℃.
