Fixing Great Wall GW3300 1TB thermal drops in Overwatch 2
The read/write speeds were swinging wildly around 1200MB/s, and the resulting hitching while loading map assets was absolutely brutal. Looking back at my build, the stock heatsink on the Great Wall GW3300 was letting temps soar to 78-84℃ under load, which triggered a massive performance drop. My first instinct was to drop the PCIe link speed in the BIOS, but while that cooled it by 5℃, my sequential reads tanked from 3500MB/s to 2800MB/s—totally unacceptable. I ended up ripping off the stock pad and replacing it with a high-performance 12W/mK thermal pad, then cranked my front case fans up to 1200 RPM. In AIDA64 stress tests, the peak temp plummeted from 84℃ down to a comfortable 58-64℃, and the speeds finally stayed at the advertised rates. It was a bit of a struggle at first because the fan noise was like a jet engine, but once I set a silent curve for everything under 50℃, it hit the sweet spot. The drive stays around 85% load now with heat dissipating instantly. HWiNFO confirms the thermal throttling is gone, and the drive stays between 58-63℃.
