Can bad RAM cause games to stutter?

Daumer · March 15, 2020

So I built myself a PC a few months ago (full specs below), and the RAM I bought is the Patriot Viper Steel 3866MHz C18 (2×8GB). It is a bit expensive but the reviews were very positive about it.

The units that were sent to online reviewers had Samsung's B-Die chip which is basically the best performing type of RAM at the moment.

However, using Taiphoon Burner I discovered that the one that I received is actually manufactured by SpecTek, a cheap sub-brand of Micron that produces low-cost memory chips. The actual die type is unknown.

This is probably just Patriot trying to mislead customers to sell cheaper RAM at a higher price. Their own website, in fact, does not mention the die type for that RAM model.

Luckily, I was able to apply XMP normally and make it run at the advertised frequency, even though some memory sub-timings seem a bit high. This is what HWiNFO shows:

Tcas: 18
Trcd: 21
Trp: 21
Tras: 41
Trc: 87
Trfc: 653

Also, UserBenchmark shows a RAM score of 92% and latency of 70ns which is worse than what some cheaper 3200MHz C16 RAM sticks can achieve.

I didn't care at first because I mostly play Rainbow Six Siege and it was running fine. This week I downloaded CoD Warzone and Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and both games stutter A LOT. The framerates are high but there are constant frametime spikes while playing (I checked using RTSS).

I have a theory for this: since both games are "open world" environments, could it be that my RAM is slow at loading/unloading game data and therefore creating those stutters? This would explain why it doesn't happen in Siege since the whole map is loaded once before the game starts.

Could this possibility be what's happening? Or am I on the wrong track?

Full PC Specs: