Is the Thermalright PA140 struggling with Judgment: Lost Wisdom?
When I saw my CPU clocks swinging between 3.8GHz and 4.5GHz, I knew my cooling was completely bottlenecked. The PA140 is a beast of an air cooler, but in these single-core heavy scenarios, the heat transfer just couldn't keep up, and my FPS started jittering around the 60 mark. I tried turning on power-saving mode in the BIOS, which was a joke—my FPS tanked to 40. After that failure, I ripped the cooler off and swapped the stock paste for a 14W/mK high-end compound and flipped my case fans to a positive pressure setup. In stress tests, the peak temp stayed locked at 78-82℃, and the clock speeds stopped diving. I did have some annoying case resonance when I first ramped up the airflow, but dialing the fans back to 1600 RPM smoothed everything out. Now the core temps sit between 65-72℃. I switched the performance profile and confirmed the clocks are totally locked, and my SSD is idling at 45-55℃.
