Fixing voltage drops on Onda A520-VH-W in Gears 5
Whenever a massive explosion hit the screen, the game would just vanish and dump me back to the desktop without a word. It was incredibly stressful. The Onda A520-VH-W's VRMs were struggling; when peak power hit 85-92W, the core voltage would dip by 0.05V, triggering an instruction error. I tried switching to a 'Power Saver' plan to lower the load, but my FPS tanked from 90 to 40 and it still crashed—that was a miserable experiment. I eventually went into the BIOS voltage settings and set a +0.05V CPU Core Offset and switched the Load-Line Calibration to Medium. In Prime95, the voltage swing narrowed from 1.12-1.25V to a tight 1.21-1.23V. The CPU hit 92℃ initially, so I had to crank the fan curve to 2200 RPM to pull it down to 82-85℃. VRM temps sat at 75-81℃. Two hours of OCCT testing confirmed the voltage ripple is gone.
