Why do these games freeze every second on my PC?

The single 16 GB stick is worth investigating. It runs the system in single-channel mode, which can hurt performance and frame-time consistency, especially in CPU-heavy simulation games. Adding a matching second 16 GB stick would enable dual-channel memory, though it may not fix the problem if the system is overheating or the drive is struggling.

This sounds like severe stuttering rather than a normal graphics performance issue. Both games are demanding on the CPU, so check CPU temperatures and clock speeds while the freezes happen. Thermal throttling or background processes could cause repeated hitching even if overall CPU usage never reaches 100%.

Open Task Manager or a hardware monitor while the game is running and watch CPU usage, temperatures, clocks, disk activity, and memory usage. CPU usage moving between 50% and 80% does not rule out a single busy thread, since these games may depend heavily on one or two cores.

Also check whether the storage drive is nearly full and whether the games are installed on a slow or unhealthy drive. Leave some free space, update the graphics and chipset drivers, and temporarily close overlays or other background programs. The laptop-style processor may limit peak performance, but it should not by itself cause constant one-second freezes in the menus.