Only with flatmod type chips (solderless) or softmods. A chip soldered inside the drive just tells the drive the disc is genuine. Doesn't change how it's read (it still uses the game read commands which are 6x, and not the DVD read commands which are 3x) like the flatmod type chips do, which simply convert the game read commands from the Wii into DVD read commands.
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Now that I think about it, if it was an overheating issue, you'd be noticing it in games loaded from USB too, not just disc games. Not necessarily in GC games though as they are made for a slower CPU anyways. So we're back to the optical drive being the most likely culprit. Are Wii games loaded from USB running fine?
That is true, I didn't consider that. Seek times are indeed pretty bad. Probably takes something like 100ms to seek (just an estimation, based on the sound it makes)
And when loading a lot of data, that data is often scattered all over the disk. Audio in one folder, level data in another, graphics in a third, and not at all organized in the order they would be accessed by the game (which would certainly simplify things)
One interesting thing, you'd think that when running games in Dolphin it would not have this 8x speed limitation, and games would load super fast. But instead, they seem to load slower, and actually slow down the game as stuff is loading causing audio stuttering. I wonder why the emulator stutters during loading but real consoles don't.