Dealing with loading stutters in Gears 5 on ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0
Running Gears 5 on this ancient board is basically a torture test; loading screens were turning into a literal slideshow. The I/O bus on the ASRock A320M was spiking from 5ms to 120ms during texture swaps, which just killed the main game thread. I tried the 'High Performance' power plan, but while the CPU clock went up, the disk I/O stayed locked—it was almost laughable how useless that was. I eventually went into system settings, split the page file across two different high-speed partitions, and killed the Windows Search Indexing service to reclaim about 400MB of RAM. Resource Monitor showed disk active time dropping from a 100% deadlock to a healthy 35-55%, and loading speed improved by roughly 40%. I messed up and set the page file to 64GB at first, which ate all my disk space, but 16GB is the sweet spot. Board temps are 50-60℃, RAM is at 7GB. Exported the I/O logs and the bottleneck is gone; fans are humming at 1400-1600RPM.
