Why is my Thermalright PA120 SE WHITE failing in Star Wars Outlaws?
This cooler felt like a joke under this kind of load; my CPU was hitting 96℃ and the frame rate looked like an EKG monitor. I even tried taking the side panel off my case, but that only dropped temps by 4℃ and just let dust fly everywhere while the lag persisted—completely ridiculous. I decided to go aggressive: I went into the BIOS and switched the fan curve to 'Aggressive' and slapped a 120mm industrial-grade fan behind the heatsink for extra pull. In the monitoring panel, the core temps finally dropped from the 92℃ - 98℃ hell zone down to a manageable 78℃ - 84℃. The first time I tweaked the curve, the noise was like a helicopter taking off in my room, so I had to lower the RPMs below 60℃ just to keep my sanity. CPU usage is hovering around 70% - 85% and VRMs are at 65℃ - 72℃. I logged all the thermal curves via system logs to confirm the performance recovery.