My Razer Blade 17 (4k 3080 Ti Laptop) started to randomly freeze one month into using. Then this problem just keeps haunting me.
My device would sometimes begin to lag tremendously until it totally froze, or just straight ahead froze. Sometimes the freezing is accompanied by artefacts on the screen, or a drill like sound because the audio output is jammed as well.
But weird enough, there were times the screen froze but the music kept playing. But the next song won’t start and the music player wouldn’t respond to any input, like next track, pause, via keystrokes or my bluetooth headphone’s touchpad.
This nightmare was a growing continuum, by which I mean at first I could close the lid to get the device to hibernate, and power up to see everything go back to normal. I would see some ‘nvlddmkm’ errors logged. So the freezings I used to get might not be the same as the ones I get now.
To help figure out what’s actually going on with my laptop, I literally built a repository on MediaFire to record these problems. Please check: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1p8l883w5rnf3/Razer_Problems
The recent dump logs and video recordings are in their corresponding folders.
Then it got worse. Even closing the lid won’t work. I tried leaving it there to see if it could resolve itself. No. Hours passed by and it was still froze as it was.
When the freezing happens, sometimes the keyboard backlight would respond according to my input, i.e. only the Fn keys get lit when I press the Fn button. But as I said as things get worse, this basic reflex disappeared as well sometimes.
As to the system, I have tried using Windows 10, Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, and stock Razer Windows 11 Home, which was then updated to a Pro for Workstations version. None of these systems had escaped the curse.
As to graphics drivers, I seriously cannot count how many times I’ve done DDU and clean installing NVIDIA drivers. The driver version ranges from 512.33 (stock driver, a private branch) all the way to 531.41. I have tried both Game Ready and Studio drivers. None was stable enough to keep an uptime of 7 days. However, there was this one version that actually ran smoothly for an entire month, but I couldn’t recollect which. I’m currently using 512.33 which I got from Windows Update.
I contacted Razer support and they diagnosed this as a motherboard problem and gave me a replacement, which obviously didn’t solve the problem. I have reset the BIOS for a million times, updated the EC and BIOS to the latest version. There isn’t one single component on my Windows 11 that isn’t up to date. But it just KEEPS FREEZING, TWICE A DAY!
When the screen blacks out, I tried connecting the laptop to an external monitor but to no avail.
As of now, I could only speculate the following causes:
- Faulty screen wiring?
- Razer’s glitchy BIOS
- NVIDIA driver problem
- Windows 11 WSL2 problem
- Hibernation
Cause No.4 might be the most plausible one, because I found that when I shutdown the WSL via PowerShell, I would hear the audio output jam for a split of a second, which is like the death bell of a freezing.
About half a month ago, I moved the pagefiles to the D driver, and swapped the physical location of my two SSDs. This somehow kept my laptop stable for an solid 10 days. But during that 10 days, I could feel for times my device is on the brim of freezing: sudden lag, audio jam, but it survived until it froze again.
I was able to induce identical freezings by manually overclocking the GPU core clock and GPU mem clock. The device would freeze after about 10 seconds, and the event logs looked the same as normal freezings. So I suspect some programme might accidentally trigger an overclocking or something.
I tried checking Debug Mode off in NVIDIA control panel. This prevents any overclocking but it didn’t prevent the eventual freezing.
So thanks in advance to whoever read my ranting and would kindly check the dump files and logs I provided (link above). Razer’s customer service is not responding to this problem anymore. I’m really desperate now.