Cities: Skylines II and Anno 117 both freeze at regular one-second intervals, including on their menu screens. Other games have not shown the problem so far. The system is an Acer Nitro N20-100-RPL with an Intel i5-13420H, RTX 5060, and 16 GB of RAM installed as a single stick. Could the laptop-class CPU or another hardware issue be causing this stuttering?
3 Answers
The single 16 GB RAM stick may be contributing. It means the system is probably running in single-channel mode, which can hurt performance and cause worse stutter in simulation-heavy games. Adding a matching 16 GB stick would enable dual-channel memory, though it may not completely fix the issue if the CPU is overheating or the game is loading from a slow or nearly full drive.
That sounds like severe stuttering rather than a normal crash. Both games can be very CPU-heavy, so monitor CPU usage, temperatures, clock speeds, and GPU usage while the freezing happens. High temperatures could cause the processor to throttle, while background processes or storage activity could also create regular pauses. Check whether the drive is nearly full as well.
The fact that it happens on the menu too makes a game-specific setting or system-level issue possible. Try updating the graphics driver and chipset drivers, checking the game files, disabling overlays, and watching Task Manager or a hardware monitor during a freeze. Also confirm that the games are installed on a healthy SSD with plenty of free space. A laptop CPU in a desktop-style system is unusual, but it is not automatically defective; its temperature and power limits matter more than the label.
CPU usage alone may not reveal the problem. Even if it only moves between 50% and 80%, one or two individual CPU cores could still be maxed out, so check per-core usage and temperatures rather than only the overall percentage.