Optimizing storage scheduling for Mass Effect on Maxsun B850ITX?
This tiny ITX board was pushing my patience to the limit; every jump felt like I was watching a slideshow. On this Maxsun board, once the SLC cache fills up during high-concurrency reads, the speed drops off a cliff from 7000MB/s to under 800MB/s, leaving the system in a severe I/O wait state for 0.8-1.5 seconds. I tried moving the game to a RAM disk, but the memory filled up instantly and the whole thing blue-screened—that was a reckless move on my part. I instead went into Device Manager and bumped the NVMe controller queue depth from 1024 to 2048 and enabled the forced write cache flush policy. In CrystalDiskMark, 4K random reads improved from 45-52MB/s to 68-75MB/s, and that annoying hitching feeling dropped by about 40%. I did run into some file corruption errors after the first queue depth tweak, but disabling my real-time antivirus fixed it. Board temps are around 58-64℃, and fans are steady at 1400-1600RPM.
