Is a loose cooler bracket causing my Overwatch 2 frame drops?
There is nothing worse than going from a fluid 144 FPS to a literal slideshow in the middle of a team fight. My Cooler Master Hyper 612 APEX was spiking to 92-98℃ after about thirty minutes of play, forcing the CPU to throttle hard and tanking my frames down to 60. I tried maxing out the fans via software, but the temps just hovered around 90℃ regardless of the noise—it was a feeling of pure desperation. I eventually ripped the cooler off and found that the stock bracket wasn't seated evenly, leaving a tiny but lethal gap between the base and the IHS. I scrubbed the oxidation off, applied some high-performance liquid metal paste, and tightened the screws in a strict diagonal pattern. According to HWMonitor, peak temps are now locked at 68-75℃, and my FPS range has tightened from a chaotic 60-144 to a steady 130-144. I actually botched the first re-paste and saw high temps again, but a second, more even spread solved it. Fans are idling at 1100 RPM, and after a 3-hour stress test, the memory temps stayed between 58-63℃.
