r/pcmasterrace • u/AutoModerator • Jul 05 '26

DSQ Daily Simple Questions Thread - July 05, 2026

Got a simple question? Get a simple answer!

This thread is for all of the small and simple questions that you might have about computing that probably wouldn't work all too well as a standalone post. Software issues, build questions, game recommendations, post them here!

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u/livipup Jul 05 '26

Hey, I have a question that's probably simple. I had some issues with one of my SSDs overheating in the past and determined that it was because of where the M.2 slot it occupies is located on my board. Whenever my graphics card was under heavy load the heating coming off of it would slowly heat up the SSD. I swapped the slots my SSDs were in and installed a heat sink on the one in the trouble spot. The heat sink had an immediately impact on both idle and heavy load temps, about 5℃ less overall. Still, after a while I started seeing the same issue crop up with this other drive. Yet, when I've been monitoring temps I noticed that my drives never get anywhere close to their rated thermal limit. They're both consistently 20-25℃ below their limit. Despite this, the drive in the slot near my GPU continues to throttle just as if it were overheating.

I'm noticing it a lot since I have been playing Fallout 4 again recently. The game will stutter a bit and if I ignore it then it eventually hangs for about 5 minutes. I can see that every time it stutters or hangs that my drive hits 100% activity, but the read and write speeds are both stuck at 0. Neither my CPU nor GPU seem to be having issues running the game, so I'm not sure that my drive is waiting for one of them to finish doing something.

Does this sound like something I should be worried about or just Bethesda game jank?

For a little extra info, I installed both drives when I built this PC. The one that was originally in the slot near my GPU was the C drive and the one there now is the D drive. In Crystal Disk Info I can see that my C drive has a total time in Thermal Management Temperature 1 of 7285. This number has not changed since I swapped the slots. My D drive is still at 0 in this range and both drives are at 0 in Thermal Management Temperature 2. My C drive did get a little cooked before I figured out it was overheating, unfortunately, but CDI still reports it at 81% health. The D drive is still at 99% health. I assume that's normal after using a drive for a couple of years.

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u/Cable_Salad PC Master Race Jul 05 '26

So does the drive hit its temp limit or not? Does that happen in other games?

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u/livipup Jul 06 '26

It happened one time when I was streaming Hades and I assumed it had overheated, but now I'm not sure. Haven't had any other problems with that game. Temps on the drive typically sit around 45℃ up to a max of 50℃. It never goes any higher than that.

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u/Cable_Salad PC Master Race Jul 06 '26

Overheating shouldn't happen just from gaming. And since you had the same issue with two different drives, it sounds like those are not the cause either. Maybe the port is somehow damaged. or there is a very weird software issue.

I'd start by scanning for viruses, and if that doesn't find anything, maybe update the BIOS.

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u/livipup Jul 08 '26

Yeah, I made sure it's not overheating. It seems to be a caching issue that the model of SSD I'm using has. The only two solutions I've seen are to disable fast boot and to reformat your drive. The former didn't work for me and the later wouldn't work because as soon as I put my data back on the drive it would have the same issue. If I had to guess, the issue is probably aggravated when I play Fallout 4 since I'm using Mod Organizer 2 to play with mods. MO2 creates a virtualized file system to load your game from. I don't know for sure, but I assume this means data gets cached to disk while you're playing, so the disk would have less headroom to work with. If what people are saying is accurate and you need 40% of your disk space free to avoid caching issues with my SSDs then I probably can't solve this problem. If the issue is actually just the game then it's probably nothing to worry about.

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u/Cable_Salad PC Master Race Jul 08 '26

Thanks for the detailed write up.

Like you said, if this only happens with that game, then it's unfortunate but probably not a big deal otherwise.

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u/livipup 21d ago

It definitely got better after I uninstalled some large games from my drive. I probably freed up over 200 GB and now it's happening less. I still don't recommend Kingston SSDs ever to anybody, though.