Is the Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB too hot for Dragon Age: The Veilguard?
Every time I entered a major city, the drive temps would spike to 82℃-88℃ without warning, triggering a massive throttle that froze my entire screen. After crashing three times in a row, I was losing my mind. Compared to my old PCIe 4.0 drives, this Gen5 beast is a total furnace, and I started suspecting the stock heatsink was useless in my cramped case. I tried forcing the PCIe link to Gen4 in the BIOS, but that just doubled my load times and the stutters still happened—just a frustrating, useless experiment. Finally, I rigged a small 40mm fan directly over the M.2 slot and disabled the disk power-saving mode in Windows. In CrystalDiskInfo, the controller temp finally dropped to a manageable 58℃-64℃, and read speeds locked in at 11.5 GB/s. I had some annoying electrical noise from the fan cables at first, but a bit of cable management fixed that. Frame pacing is now steady at 16-20ms, and the crashes are gone. Active cooling is the only way to keep these Gen5 drives from choking.
