How to fix thermal throttling on Seagate FireCuda 530 in TLOU 2?
Whenever I hit those dense urban ruin scenes, the loading bar just freezes up. It's a total buzzkill for the immersion. I checked HWiNFO and the FireCuda 530 controller was screaming at 82-88℃, triggering a hardware-level throttle that tanked my speeds from 7000MB/s down to around 2200MB/s. I tried downgrading the slot to Gen3 in BIOS, which cooled it down but added 4 seconds to every load—a total waste of bandwidth that left me scratching my head. I ended up cranking up the front intake fan curves and rigged a custom air shroud to blast the heatsink directly. HWiNFO showed temps dropping to 62-68℃, and the throttling vanished. Funnily enough, the first airflow tweak actually bumped my GPU temps by 3℃ until I tweaked the exhaust angle to balance it out. Now, peak R/W is rock steady at 6500-7000MB/s. System analyzer confirms the throughput is stable, and frame times are sitting pretty at 5.1-6.4ms. It's a bit of a hassle to manage the fan noise, but the stability is worth it.
