Why is my Noctua NH-D15S failing in Mario 4K emulation?
Running the 4K resolution patch was a disaster—my FPS would suddenly drop from 60 to 45. It was honestly pathetic. HWiNFO showed the CPU hitting 92℃ while processing complex instruction sets, causing the clock to crash from 4.8GHz down to 3.5GHz. I tried lowering the render scale in the emulator, but the image became a blurry mess, and it did nothing to stop the hardware from overheating. I eventually went into the BIOS and manually locked the core frequency at 4.2GHz, and set the NH-D15S fans to run full speed starting at 60℃. In stress tests, the frequency stayed dead-locked at 4.2GHz and the stutters vanished. I actually saw a 6℃ temp increase after locking the clocks, but re-applying some high-end thermal paste brought it back down. Temps now sit between 75-81℃. Saved the BIOS profile and I'm good to go.
