Solving Thermalright PA120 SE throttling in Rainbow Six Siege
My clock speeds were bouncing all over the place around 3.8GHz, and the game would hitch every few seconds. I was actually kind of excited to hunt down the cause of this lag. It turned out the mounting pressure on my PA120 SE was uneven, causing core temps to spike to 92-96℃ and hit the thermal wall instantly. I tried undervolting in the BIOS first, which dropped the temp by 4℃ but killed my FPS from 240 down to 190—not a trade-off I was willing to make. I ended up remounting the whole cooler with a high-end 13.5W/mK paste and set the fan curve to hit 100% once the CPU touched 70℃. In AIDA64, the peak temp dropped from 96℃ to a stable 72-78℃, and my clocks finally locked in at 4.5GHz. The fans sounded like a helicopter taking off at first, but I tweaked the start-up speed to 500 RPM to balance the noise. The CPU load is around 80% and the heat is gone. HWiNFO shows the heat soak is solved, with temps staying between 72-78℃.
