Hitting a performance wall in Starfield with Zotac?
After cycling through three driver combos and still getting micro-stutters, I realized I was looking at the wrong thing. I ran stress test ST-S4-11 in 3DMark for 30 minutes and saw the core clock fluttering around 2.5 GHz, triggering a throttle the second the package hit 84℃. The bottleneck wasn't the GPU power, but heat soak at the top of my case. I went into BIOS -> Hardware Monitor and bumped the front fan speed from 40% to 70%. Peak temps dropped to 77℃ and average FPS climbed from 62 to 78. Even so, 1% lows still dip to 40 FPS in dense cities—that's just the game's garbage CPU optimization, and no amount of hardware can fix that.
