Sigh... Yup, after three weeks I was able to hear the dreaded cracking noise once again... It only happened once.
So I am sorry, I am taking it back. Clean install WILL NOT fix this. For me, it just kept the ram usage very low and I rarely (if ever) reached the orange zone, thus no distortions were produced. Although just after the reinstall I tried loading the ram to reach the orange zone and did not get any distortions. So high RAM load might be just a coincidence and not an actual indicator.