Should I manually tune timings for Crucial DDR4 3200 16GB?
Those random color streaks across the screen were driving me crazy, especially when moving fast. Digging into the root cause, the default XMP profile for my Crucial DDR4 3200 had latency jitters between 42-55ns on my specific motherboard, which messed with the GPU's texture data stream. I tried increasing the page file size first, but that was a waste of time; it didn't stop the flickering and actually tanked my FPS from 72 down to 58. I realized this was a physical timing issue. I dove into the BIOS Advanced settings and bumped the primary timings from 16-18-18-36 to a more stable 16-20-20-38, while pushing the voltage from 1.2V to 1.35V. In AIDA64, read/write latency tightened from 82-95ns to 74-78ns, and textures finally loaded smoothly. I actually crashed the game twice during the process because I tried to push tRCD too low, but loosening it by 2 units fixed everything. RAM temps sat at 42-48℃ and VRM temps were 55-60℃. Ran 6 cycles of MemTest86 with zero errors, and the temps stayed locked at 42-48℃.
