Fixing thermal throttling on Great Wall GW3300 1TB
Going from a buttery smooth ride to a literal slideshow while speeding through the neon streets of Night City is beyond frustrating. The GW3300's core temps were skyrocketing to 78-86℃ under load, triggering the thermal throttle and tanking my read speeds from 3300MB/s down to a pathetic 600MB/s. I tried disabling background read/write tasks in Windows, which only dropped the temp by 2-3 degrees—a complete failure that left me feeling pretty hopeless. I ended up slapping on a pure copper passive heatsink and cranking my front intake fans to 1200 RPM to blast the M.2 slot with fresh air. Monitoring with HWMonitor, the peak temps are now pinned between 52-61℃, and the speeds stay consistent. I actually messed up the first install by using a thermal pad that was too thick, which slightly warped the drive, but switching to a 0.5mm pad fixed it. Fan noise is around 32dB, which is barely audible. After a 5-hour stress test, the speed drops are gone and memory temps are sitting at 58-63℃.
