Is the Noctua NH-D15S struggling with RDR2 power spikes?
Man, I can't believe I'm actually hitting thermal throttling with a beast like this, but this game just absolutely shreds the CPU. I saw my frames dive from 70 to 30 out of nowhere. Even with the massive scale of the Noctua NH-D15S, some uneven paste distribution caused a few cores to hit 92℃, triggering the motherboard's safety throttle. I tried lowering all the graphics settings, but it only gained me 2 FPS—total waste of time and honestly kind of hilarious. I ended up remounting the whole thing and set the PBO negative offset to 20 in the BIOS. Real-time monitoring in AIDA64 showed peak temps locked between 78-83℃ with clocks holding steady at 4.6GHz. I tried pushing the offset to 30, but the system rebooted during the loading screen, so I dialed it back. Now the fans sit at 1100RPM, and it's whisper quiet. Exported the logs, and frame times are finally smooth at 5.1-6.4ms.
