Dealing with power limit throttling on ASRock Z370M Pro4?
Running a modern game on this ancient board is a struggle; the FPS would suddenly tank to 20, making it look like a PowerPoint presentation. The VRMs on the Z370M Pro4 were hitting 105℃ during transient peaks, triggering a hard thermal throttle. I jokingly tried taping a tiny fan to the VRMs, but it only dropped the temp by 2℃—completely useless. I had to go into the BIOS $\rightarrow$ Advanced $\rightarrow$ CPU Configuration and manually unlock PL1 and PL2 to 125W, while setting the fans to full blast. HWMonitor showed the clocks stabilizing from a shaky 2.1GHz to a steady 3.8-4.2GHz. I had two random reboots after the first unlock, but bumping Vcore to 1.2V fixed the instability. VRMs are now sitting at 85-92℃. I exported the logs just to make sure it doesn't crash again.
