Improving G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 response in Cities Skylines

Zooming into my city felt like I was playing a slideshow; the loading lag is absolutely lethal when managing ten thousand active units. Looking back at my logs, the 8GB capacity of the G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 just couldn't handle 20GB of MOD assets, forcing the system into constant page swapping with I/O latency spiking between 110-180ms. I tried increasing the page file to 32GB, but that actually made the overall responsiveness drop by about 15%, which was incredibly frustrating. I went back to the BIOS and manually tightened the primary timings from 16-18-18-38 down to 14-16-16-34 and bumped the voltage to 1.35V. Using a latency analyzer, I saw the memory response time shrink from 88ns to a tight 72-76ns, and the city simulation finally felt fluid. I did experience a brief black screen on the first boot after tightening, but loosening tRCD to 16 fixed the stability. Temps sat at 42-48℃ for RAM and 60-68℃ for the CPU. MemTest86 confirmed zero errors over multiple passes, though the low capacity remains a bottleneck.
Category:Troubleshooting Last updated:March 20, 2026 1:45 PM