Fixing bus latency on ASUS ROG STRIX Z890-A Snow Edition?
It's absolutely ridiculous that a top-tier Z890 board could cause frame drops in Final Fantasy. After some digging, I found that the default power-saving policies were causing a 10-20ms wake-up latency on the PCIe bus during low-load transitions, making the FPS jump violently between 120 and 60. I tried 'High Performance' mode in Windows, but while the CPU clocks stayed up, the bus latency persisted. I had to go into the BIOS and completely disable PCIe Link State Power Management and set the C-State mode to High Performance. In AIDA64, the system latency plummeted to 55-60ns, and the combat smoothness finally returned. I did notice my idle power draw jumped by about 30W after disabling C-States, but a slight voltage offset tweak balanced it out. VRM temps stayed at 55-62℃ and core temps at 62-65℃.
