Fixing PCIe link errors on ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0?
Man, this board decided to give up on me during a legacy game—absolutely ridiculous. The PCIe lanes on the ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 were struggling with signal integrity, causing the bus to flip-flop between Gen 4 and Gen 3, which triggered a driver-level TDR crash. I tried lowering the texture resolution, but the game looked like a blurry mess and it still crashed; it was pure mental torture. I eventually went into the BIOS and forced the PCIe protocol to Gen 3 and updated the AMD chipset drivers to fix the IRQ distribution. In GPU-Z, the link state finally stayed locked at 8.0 GT/s, and the crashes stopped. I did notice my NVMe read speeds dropped by about 800MB/s after locking Gen 3, but a quick partition reformat seemed to help a bit. Board temps are around 40-46℃. I exported the system logs to verify no more link errors, and the fans are humming steadily at 1400-1600RPM.
