Why is my ASRock Z370M Pro4 losing voltage in city hubs?
Whenever I hit the bustling city center, the smoothness just vanishes and I get these violent stutters—it's honestly bizarre for a Z370 platform running a next-gen engine. I tracked it down and found that when the transient power spikes past 110W, the Vcore on my ASRock Z370M Pro4 tanked from 1.25V down to 1.12V, triggering a nasty downclocking protection. I first tried lowering the ambient occlusion settings to ease the load, but that only gained me 3 FPS while the stutters kept happening randomly; it was a complete waste of time. I eventually dove into the BIOS, flipped the Load-Line Calibration from Auto to Medium, and capped the PL1 power limit at 95W to stop the VRMs from choking. Monitoring with HWMonitor, the voltage swing tightened from +/- 0.15V to a much cleaner +/- 0.06V, and my frame times stopped jumping between 22-50ms, settling instead at 16-22ms. I did hit a wall early on where the system froze twice during boot, but a chipset driver update finally killed that bug. Now the CPU package power sits comfortably between 85-95W. After some heavy stress testing, the power delivery is finally in a steady state, and those 16-22ms frame times are holding firm.
