Fixing PCIe handshake delays for Gainward RTX 5070 Ti
During the loading screen, the system would just hang for about 8 seconds—totally unresponsive. In a stealth game, that kind of instability is just nerve-wracking. The PCIe 5.0 link on the Gainward RTX 5070 Ti has a 15-22 ms handshake delay in 'Auto' mode, which frequently triggers a driver timeout. I tried disabling Fast Startup in Windows, but it didn't stop the freezes; it just made my boot time longer, which felt like a step backward. I eventually flashed the latest BIOS and forced the PCIe slot to Gen5 mode instead of Auto. Device Manager now shows a stable link speed of 32 GT/s, and the loading freezes are gone. I noticed some M.2 drives weren't showing up after the change, but updating the chipset drivers fixed that. The motherboard VRM temps are sitting at 48-55°C, and stress tests confirm the data stream is no longer interrupting.
