Fixing Seagate FireCuda 540 thermal throttling in Far Cry 6
The game would just vanish and dump me back to the desktop after about an hour, which is an absolute nightmare when you're mid-mission. Monitoring showed the FireCuda 540 controller hitting a blistering 82-88℃ during 2GB large-file writes, triggering the hardware thermal shutdown. I tried slapping two more fans on the top of my case, but that only dropped the temp by 3℃—the core was still hovering above 80℃, so the crashes kept happening. I finally went into Device Manager and changed the write caching policy from 'Maximum' to 'Balanced' and set the PCIe power management to 'Maximum Performance'. In OCCT stress tests, the controller temp dropped to a safe 65-72℃, and the crashes stopped entirely. I noticed loading times increased by about a second after the cache tweak, but enabling Re-Size BAR brought that performance back. Temps are now steady at 58-64℃. After 5 hours of gaming, no crashes, and the controls feel incredibly responsive.
