Why does my Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB overheat and cause missing textures in large Rome battles?

Seeing Roman armor suddenly turn into low-poly blobs was incredibly frustrating, especially given the raw speed of PCIe 5.0. The Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB core temps were spiking to 82℃ - 86℃, triggering a brutal hardware protection mode that crashed my read bandwidth from 10GB/s down to a pathetic 2.1GB/s - 2.4GB/s. I tried dropping the PCIe link to 4.0 in the BIOS; while temps hit 65℃, the load times became unbearable, making it a useless compromise. I ended up stripping the heatsink and swapping in 1.5mm nano-thermal pads, then tightened the metal clips for a tighter squeeze. During a 100GB stress test, peak temps stayed locked between 68℃ - 72℃, and textures finally loaded smoothly. I actually messed up the first attempt with pads that were too thin, causing poor contact, but the second try nailed it. The NVMe controller power draw is now hovering around 8.5W - 11.2W with clean airflow. System logs show zero thermal throttling events now, but man, PCIe 5.0 heat is no joke.