Why does Dead Space 2 Remake crash with the PCcooler RT500?
Walking through those dark ship corridors and having the game just crash to desktop is a special kind of frustration. The crash logs showed that Core 2 was running way hotter than the others; the PCcooler RT500 TC ARGB had a serious conduction bottleneck at that specific hot spot, causing the core voltage to jump erratically between 1.1V - 1.3V. I tried increasing the virtual memory as a hail-mary, but it didn't do a thing—it still crashed every ten minutes. That's when I realized this was a physical cooling failure. I inspected the cooler base and found the factory surface was slightly convex, meaning poor contact. After some careful sanding and fresh paste, the core delta dropped from 12℃ to 4℃. In an OCCT stress test, temps stayed between 74℃ - 79℃, and voltage ripple was kept within ±0.02V. I tried a -0.1V offset at first, which caused a boot failure, so I settled on -0.05V for stability. Fans are humming along at 1600RPM - 1800RPM. After 4 hours of gaming, no more crashes, and voltage is locked at 1.15V - 1.21V. It was a struggle, but it's finally stable.
