M11x periodic lockup

recently i have had issues with periodic lockups with my M11xR1. every few minutes my game completely stutters for ~3-5 seconds and becomes unresponsive to input. I had the fan replaced from a dell technician, which included the heatsink assembly and previous to that, I have never experienced this problem. I have opened the computer and replaced the thermal paste thinking it might be the issue but with no success.

my cpu temps remain 40-45 but my gpu load periodically drops to 0 (or low). attached is log file for gpu-z while playing a game, and also a plot of the gpu load.

Date , GPU Core Clock [MHz] , GPU Memory Clock [MHz] , GPU Shader - Pastebin.com
http://i.imgur.com/peD7L.png

thanks

 

This is actually a known problem with the Alienware M11x R2. It has to do with your shader clocks. The symptoms for this "freezing" problem include:

-Stuttering audio, or audio that continues to play in the background even after a freeze
- Windows 7 telling you the game has become unresponsive and tries to close it
- An inability to close the game's .exe after the crash, or initiating other 3D applications

I see from this:
Date , GPU Core Clock [MHz] , GPU Memory Clock [MHz] , GPU Shader - Pastebin.com

That your shader clock is set to the default 450 mhz. You need to download a program called eVGA Precision Tools ( http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7009196/Applications/EVGA_Precision_Setup_202.exe) and downclock your shaders a little bit. I have mine set to 427 and my system has not frozen in months. There is no noticeable performance hit to doing this... at least none that I can see or measure.

Downclock your shader mhz and your lockups will go away completely.

Hope this helps.

 

Since you have a r1, I think I can help here.... go into power options and make sure that the gpu is set to "max" while on battery.

Its set to save power by default, mine did this and caused the same problems as you have.

 

Excelent post +rep for you...

I was wondering if you knew about this:

while playing COD5 WaW I get choppi audio BUT just from the music not from the FX... is this part of the same issue?

 

Do you mean the GPU Core Clock? My GPU Shader clock is reporting 1080 MHz and 427 seems like a major downclock..

edit: still locking up. my core clock is 427.5 MHz and shader clock is at 1026 MHz. The GPU memory is at 789.8 mhz if that matters. the GPU temperatures have not exceeded 55C and i still have 700mb+ memory free

 

I had no improvements with GPU clocking changes (up or down). It gradually got better as I stopped gaming.

Actually it got better on its own, suspect the vid driver updates were helping.

Just changed my GPU_on_batt_to_max as mentioned above. Not seeing the connection but no harm trying it.

 

Whoa, I'm having this exact problem with Everquest 2 (stuttering audio, music/audio continuing to play after freeze and not being able to force quit the .exe in task manager) and now with the added pleasure of the occasional blue screen....

Weird thing it just started happening. I'd been gaming without issue since getting my R2 almost a year ago (EQ2, CoD:BOPS, MW2, Borderlands), got busy last winter (around last Feb.) and hadn't played anything until just last week. Nothing updated other than the usual windows updates (security, office, etc.), but after the first couple freezes I updated the nvidia drivers to the current official version. That's when the blue screens joined the party.

So I guess I'll try to roll back my drivers and downclock the shaders like to suggest. If you have any other advice, I welcome it! Thank you!