Deep hardware state verification for the ASRock A320M
I used a trial-and-error approach here. Most people just reinstall drivers, but on an old A320 platform, that's a waste of time. I pulled up the HWiNFO64 sensor page and saw the chipset was fine at 51℃ - 56℃, but the L3 cache hit rate plummeted from 96% to 82% the moment a jump happened, causing that micro-stutter. I killed every single unnecessary background app to stop them from fighting the CPU for cache. Then I used AIDA64 to verify that core voltage was stable between 1.16V - 1.26V, which bumped single-core performance by 11% - 16%. After five consecutive jumps, frame gen latency dropped 9% - 14% and tearing was way less noticeable. Honestly though, the A320M's VRMs are weak; after a few hours, the clock speed dips by 40MHz - 60MHz, so the smoothness does degrade over time.
