How to stop VRM overheating on Colorful H610M-K M.2 V20?
These random hard locks had me convinced my GPU was dying; the anxiety was real after the third crash in a row. I checked the sensors and found the VRMs on the Colorful H610M-K M.2 V20 were screaming at 98-105℃ during CPU spikes, which just triggered the hardware thermal protection. I tried slapping three extra fans in the case, but the temp only dropped by 3℃—totally useless against such a weak power phase design. I had to go into the BIOS and manually cap PL1 at 65W and PL2 at 80W, while adding a -0.05V offset to the core voltage. In HWMonitor, the VRM temps immediately dropped to 72-78℃, and the locking stopped. I noticed some slight clock fluctuations during heavy combat after the cap, which I only fixed by locking the RAM frequency to 2666MHz. CPU cores now sit between 65-72℃. I lost maybe 5% performance, but I'll take that over a frozen PC any day. The power wall is now defined, and the system actually stays alive. It's a bit of a compromise, but it works.
