How to fix Intel 660P performance drop in Horizon Forbidden West?
I was loving the openness of Forbidden West until I realized that after ten hours of play, my load times climbed from 8 seconds to 15 seconds. The QLC NAND in the Intel 660P just tanks once the cache is gone, with read latency jumping from 30ms to a sluggish 75-92ms. I tried a simple system reboot to clear the cache, but it only shaved off a second—totally useless against QLC degradation. I ended up manually triggering a full-drive TRIM and used a partition tool to re-align the 4K sectors. A second pass in CrystalDiskMark showed sequential reads climbing back from 1800MB/s to 2100-2300MB/s. It was a bit scary because the drive hit 72℃ during the TRIM process and triggered a brief thermal throttle, but adding a small dedicated fan stabilized it. The drive load now fluctuates between 40-60%. I switched the read mode to High Performance in the storage manager, and frame times are now solid at 5.1-6.4ms.
