Where is the performance bottleneck on the Colorful H610M-K board?
This was a long struggle with an evasive bug. I initially blamed the thermals, but OCCT showed the core was only hitting 72°C - 78°C. Then I ran a 3DMark CPU benchmark and saw single-core clocks hovering between 4.5GHz - 4.8GHz, but the multi-core score was a pathetic 11200 - 12500. Digging deeper, I found the VRM was hitting a power wall, with the threshold jumping erratically between 82W - 92W. I tried undervolting the core by 0.02V in the BIOS and used CrystalDiskMark to verify the storage link, which was solid at 3500MB/s - 3800MB/s. After this, combat stutters dropped by 15% - 20%, and it felt way snappier. Unfortunately, because the H610 chipset is so limited, I can't enable higher XMP profiles, meaning those tiny hitches in extreme load scenarios are basically baked into the hardware.
