AW 17 R4 hard locking randomly on certain games

Hi all,

just recently acquired an AW R4 2017 model. It has a 7700HQ 2.8mhz processor, GTX 1080 specifically.

Currently having issues while playing certain games. I've noticed that while playing, all of a sudden, my laptop will lock up and loop sound into this annoying infinite beep and my whole computer becomes non-responsive to anything other than powering it down using the power button.

Things I've noticed:
-Temps have never exceeded 85C while playing(that I know of, i often check them when I tab out every 10-20 mins but who knows when it actually locks up.) I stress tested using dell support assist and it got up to 92C I think.
-Using TS to undervolt doesn't seem to help much with temps either. I can undervolt to about .103mv but it doesnt seem to bring down the VID much. I've tried undervolting upwards to .125 but it will BSOD after about 30 mins even though the max VID doesn't seem to go down much under 1.1 so I'm guessing I was the big loser of the silicon lottery.

It feels like a driver issue but all my diagnostics passed using Dell Support Assist and I have all my drivers up to date including BIOS.

I am kind of puzzled at this point but was just wondering if anyone else was experiencing this from their R4 or had similiar issues altogether with their AW product.

Thanks

JD

 

Had same issue like you. Changed a lot of os-es,tried all the regiatry hacks known to man,even changed the cpu microcode...but after reinstalling a fresh win 10 -enterprise in my case ( wink wink), now it doesnt do that,luckily. Been going strong for a week,no freeze or crash
Try to repair windows,but i doubt that will fix it.

Find a win 10 and reinstall fresh everything.

 

did you just have a standard win 10 then and upgraded to enterprise edition?

That's at least something to try, was hoping I wouldn't have to go that far but will look into it. Thanks!

 

this happened to me before. it stopped now though. probably windows related

 

In case anyone else is having this problem, i ended up just doing a factory restore of my laptop and now everything seems to be working okay now for the moment. Usually specific games crash by now but haven't yet. So aside from the minor and irritating inconvenience, i have my fingers crossed at the moment!

 

Please download HD Tune 5.60 or newer (or even that other crystal diskinfo program) and look under drive health and see if you have DMA errors on your mechanical hard drive.
This is NOT the drive's fault.

Did any of you people who were having these freezes update to windows 10 Creator's update, from a version of windows 10 build before Creator's update? Were all of you using the Creator's update at this time?

 

Does it lock up if you don't have your CPU undervolted?

 

Well the locking up started again, this time the same thing on a completely different game I hadn't played in a year or so.

@Falkentyne: This is just the Windows 10 Home edition that came standard with my Alienware 17R4. When I ran Alienware's support tools that checks the integrity of the system, everything came back a pass, even the HD.

@namaiki: it locks up whether it's undervolted or not. Undervolt doesn't really do much in terms of lowering my VID, even at as far as -.100. Much higher and it will blue screen in a very short period of time.

I'm still suspecting its a driver issue of some type. It only seems to crash during high end gaming. It has never crashed if I just casually browse the web, watch youtube or netflix.

 

Hi, Yes I understand.
But please run HD tune 5.60 like I said.
*Were you using Windows creator's update when the crashes started*?

The alienware support tool isnt good enough.
Just trust me for once?

Go to the mechanical HDD under smart info in HD Tune 5.60 (or newer) and tell me if it has any CRC DMA Errors, please.

 

Additionally, also perform disk check. Use this Command: chkdsk /f /x C:
Note: Replace C with another letter to reflect your drive letter in Windows.

 

@Falkentyne I haven't downloaded the Creator's update to my knowledge, unless Windows slipped it in with an auto update. I wasn't even aware of such thing that existed. I downloaded HD tune, couldn't find 5.60 so i just downloaded the trial of 5.7. Not seeing the options you are specifying, but ran an "Error check" and the blocks came back as fine. Btw, I wasn't dismissing your information, I just falsely assumed Alienware's tools would cover the same job.

@Vasudev I ran the chkdsk as you specified as well upon reboot, but I didn't get any errors that I can see unless there is a proper log to check somewhere that I don't know about

 

The Smart info only shows up if you're using a mechanical hard drive.
In HD Tune, you can see "CRC DMA Error rate" and other stats for the hard drives under "Drive heath/smart"
I was only asking because i had freezes like this also, right after installing the windows 10 creator's update, which was caused by SOME sort of windows driver causing DMA CRC errors to happen on the hard drive, which triggered those errors. The drive was fine; when I removed it and installed it on my desktop, there were NO problems at all whatsoever, zero, nada, so it was the Creator's Update causing problems somehow, which I was unable to fix, except by not using it.

 

Does the creator's update get slipped in with auto updates?( Update: Found out that I do NOT have the creator's update installed.) It seems, anecdotally, that it is when all of the problems arise. It never crashed the entire day it was at factory default. could be coincidental but I was able to play one of my "crashing games" for almost 6 hours straight with no problems. Typically, I crash every 20 mins- 1 hour otherwise.

Update: I just swapped in my SSD drive and ran the same game on that HD instead of the one in question that I was using. Same crash type that locked up the whole computer.

 

Did you get any minidump file of BSOD?

 

@Vasudev No, it only ever told me it was an unknown reason for crash since it was a hard lock up, it never really actually had a BSOD.

I think I may have figured it out though for the moment. I think it was a Real-Tek audio driver and an NVIDIA audio device in my device manager that were conflicting called Nvidia Virtual Audio device,which is why it would loop sound stutter and then hard crash.

I disabled the NVIDIA Virtual Audio device as it has no bearing on my sound and everything seems okay for the moment. I also updated my real-tek driver as I had read people getting hard locks when their driver conflicts with Windows 10. So all is well at the moment, running games fine. I'll report back if it rears it's ugly head again.

 

...or you could just do a fresh win 10 install, not upgrade,like i recommended.

In my case , i tried 2 mechanical and 2 ssd's (hynix and a new 960 evo), chkdisk came fine, aw test came fine, crystal disk came fine,i think i tried a batch of over 10 programs back to back.
Stress tests,undervolts,overvolts,driverreinstalls, everything i could imagine.nothing worked.

I grabbed a win 10 iso,made a bootable usb using windows usb dvd creation tool(8gigs should suffice), formatted the partition,reinstalled fresh (after inserting nvme drivers) and installed all the drivers on the dell website,starting with ethernet,wifi,chipset.

All the games that froze windows without bsod, now work perfectly fine.

Again,try a fresh reinstall (after you save your win 10 key for reference) and you'll see the difference.it takes you....2hrs max to get everything up and running. Considering how much time you wasted so far,that's nothing.
Steam even recognosed my D:\steamapps folder after reinstallz

 

Download Driver Store Explorer and put a screenie. I think multiple copies of drivers are causing this.

 

I haven't had any lock ups since I last posted but if I start having them again, I will indeed try to fresh install it. The problem is getting ahold of an ISO, not that I didn't want to. When I talked to Dell, they recommended I try to factory reset my laptop so that is the route I went. Not that I'm choosing their advice over yours, but it was a much easier route to go and it was pre-built into my laptop.

 

Okay, I followed your advice and downloaded this. Here is my screenie:

Edit: Not sure why I accidentally uploaded it 3 times but it's the same thing. My bad.

 

Now check mark drivers which are shown in this picture. Run as admin and check mark Force Driver deletion option.

After removal reboot and try these commands in elevated command prompt aka cmd in admin mode. Copy and paste these commands one by one.

Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

 

Here are the results:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.14393.0

Image Version: 10.0.14393.0
[===========================99.6%========================= ]
Component Store (WinSxS) information:
Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 6.85 GB
Actual Size of Component Store : 6.36 GB
Shared with Windows : 5.53 GB
Backups and Disabled Features : 579.15 MB
Cache and Temporary Data : 249.91 MB
Date of Last Cleanup : 2017-08-19 20:02:39
Number of Reclaimable Packages : 0
Component Store Cleanup Recommended : No
The operation completed successfully.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.14393.0

Image Version: 10.0.14393.0

[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

 

Disable Feature upgrades in Windows Update settings. Don't update to Creators update.

 

I am looking in the Windows Update Settings but I do not see how to do that. I have Windows 10 Home edition.

 

Click on Advanced Option and you will find the setting to disable Feature Upgrade, just uncheck it.