How to optimize PCIe lanes on ROG STRIX Z890-A for Star Wars?
The frame rate suddenly tanks to 30 FPS, and the game turns into a slideshow. It's absolutely ridiculous. The PCIe 5.0 lanes on the ASUS Z890 Snow were fighting over concurrent requests between the NVMe drive and the GPU, creating a 12-20ms bus contention delay. I tried updating all the chipset drivers in Windows, but the bandwidth usage was still jumping around 85%—it was almost comical how ineffective that was. I went into the BIOS, forced the PCIe link mode from 'Auto' to 'Gen 5', and killed all the unnecessary power-saving ports. In AIDA64, read speeds jumped from 6500MB/s to over 11000MB/s, and the loading stutters are completely gone. I did have a weird issue where the system took 5 seconds longer to boot after locking the link, but flashing the latest BIOS microcode cleared it up. VRM temps are steady at 52-58℃, and the fans are humming along at 1400-1600RPM.
