For a while, I genuinely believed my system was just aging, and the solution was maybe a new upgrade. On paper, it didn’t make sense at all because I was running an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X on an MSI B550M Gaming Plus, which is still a very capable combination for modern gaming. Yet the experience didn’t match the specs. Games would run fine, then suddenly dip. Not in a predictable way like thermal throttling after long sessions, but randomly after minutes or sometimes even immediately. It wasn’t a crash, not a freeze, just a drop in smoothness that would make you get angry and wish it had just crashed instead of feeling inconsistent.