Why is my Intel 660P 2TB causing frame drops in Night City?
Driving through Night City felt like a slideshow with these weird stepped stutters, which is typical for QLC NAND. While sequential reads are fine, the random 4K performance on my Intel 660P was swinging wildly between 38-52MB/s. I tried disabling the write cache in Windows, but that was a mistake—it actually added 4 seconds to my load times, which left me completely baffled. I eventually grabbed the latest manufacturer drivers and bumped the I/O queue depth from 32 to 128, then tweaked the disk scheduling algorithm to high performance via the registry. In AIDA64 storage benchmarks, the random read latency dropped from 92-115us down to a steady 58-66us, and the world streaming finally felt seamless. I did notice some weird disk usage spikes during idle right after the queue depth change, but switching my power plan to Ultimate Performance killed that off. Temps sat around 42-50℃, and the heatsink was warm to the touch. After verifying the instruction sets in the tool panel, my frame times finally stabilized between 5.1-6.4ms.
