I hadn't seen the part about disabling the PCIe link state before. Hope it keeps your TDR's at bay.
'Off' looks to be the default setting for the High Performance option on my machine.
I've been using a Balanced power plan (monitor off after 15min and Sleep after 25min), and just looked and see my PCIe is set to Moderate power savings,
which I also assume is default for the Balanced
power plan.
I've noticed High Performance is a common power setting suggestion for laptops when running games.
Interesting that you didn't get a TDR with a game running. I believe the few TDR's I've experienced
where with games pushing the system.
It does look as if the TDR 'solution' to premature BSOD is one of those 'seemed like a good idea at the time' things, and while a BSOD can be equally frustrating to troubleshoot, at least you only had to deal with one error system.
Looking further into the article I notice they mention down clocking the RAM speed. This is something
that caught me out a couple of years ago. I was unaware that some speeds are considered OC speed
even though it was not advertised as such, so while DDR3 1600MHz was heavily marketed they didn't
say that you had to OC the cpu to get over 1333MHz stable. I had a long discussion on the Corsair
forums about their marketing tactics in relation to that.
I see the motherboard mfg's are advertising certain RAM speeds with an (OC) lately.