How to fix I/O latency in Silent Hill 2 on MAXSUN B850M-K?
It was unbearable; the board was choking on the fragmented resource loads of the Remake, causing a noticeable hitch every few seconds. The PCIe lanes on the MAXSUN MS-Challenger B850M-K had a handshake latency of 12-20ms with my NVMe SSD, which translated directly into in-game stutters. I tried increasing the virtual memory in Windows, but that just bloated the disk writes and pushed the SSD temp to 65℃—a complete waste of time. I eventually went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe link mode to Gen4 instead of 'Auto' and updated the chipset drivers. CrystalDiskMark showed random read latency drop from 15ms to 8-11ms, and the transitions became buttery smooth. I actually had a moment where the SSD wasn't detected after the change, but a quick reseat and BIOS update fixed it. Board temps are now 42-48℃. I backed up the BIOS profile, and fans are steady at 1800-2100RPM.
