This is a bit of a throwback, but considering how much effort I put into solving this issue, I thought it’d be worth sharing.
For me, the problem only showed up with one specific game — everything else ran flawlessly. I went through all the usual troubleshooting advice without any success. I was confident my GPU wasn’t overheating, with core temps peaking in the 70s and hotspot temps staying in the low 90s.
Digging deeper, I noticed the hotspot delta was bigger than I liked — sometimes over 25°C. Now, I know there’s debate over how much hotspot temps actually matter since they’re calculated, but from my experience, when the delta grows too wide, it’s often a red flag that your thermal paste or cooling setup isn’t performing properly.
I ended up replacing the thermal paste with PTM, and the difference was night and day. Running the exact same game with the same settings, my core temps dropped from 75°C to 66°C, and hotspot temps dropped from 94°C to 79°C. Best part — zero crashes after 5 hours of play, whereas before I’d crash at least once an hour.
In short, even though my temps looked “okay” on paper, cooling issues were still causing the crashes. And once I got things sorted, I finally had smooth gameplay — just like streaming music on Spotify mod without a single skip.