Why does Kioxia EXCERIA PRO 2TB cause stutters in Orion?
Cruising through Night City was a mess; the game would just hitch out of nowhere, which totally killed the immersion. I ran a test and found the sequential read speed was only 3500MB/s, which meant the motherboard had incorrectly negotiated the PCIe link to Gen3 mode. This created a massive I/O bottleneck when the CPU tried to pull in high-res textures. I tried the High Performance power plan first, but that did absolutely nothing for a physical link bottleneck. I had to go into the BIOS and manually force the M.2 slot to Gen4 mode and update the PCIe bridge drivers. Suddenly, read speeds jumped to 7000-7400MB/s, and the game became smooth as silk. I did have two failed POST attempts after forcing Gen4, but lowering my RAM XMP slightly fixed the stability. Now, the drive sits at 48-55℃. The benchmarks confirm the bandwidth is finally where it should be, with reads stable at 7000-7400MB/s.
