Does the Noctua NH-D15 G2 suffer from heat soak in Metaphor: ReFantazio?
Every time I entered a complex city area, my FPS would dive from 120 down to 45, and the anxiety was real. The NH-D15 G2's fins were just soaking up heat over time, causing the core to climb from 65°C to 86°C, which triggered the hardware throttling. I tried capping the CPU power at 65W in the BIOS, but the game became a slideshow—totally unacceptable. I decided to go nuclear: tore it down and applied liquid metal thermal interface material, then swapped the fan curve to an aggressive profile. Monitoring with HWMonitor, temps dropped back to 68-73°C and frame times tightened from 16-25ms to a crisp 11-14ms. I almost fried my board because I applied too much liquid metal and it leaked slightly, which was a heart-stopping moment until I cleaned it with isopropyl alcohol. Now RAM is stable at 42-46°C and the GPU sits at 60-65°C. Ran a Cinebench loop and the clock speeds are finally locked in; the input lag is gone and it feels incredibly responsive.