ASUS Gaming Laptops Have Been Broken Since 2021: A Deep Dive

[ZephKeks]

ASUS ROG stutters/crackles? It’s not Windows or NVIDIA. It’s firmware. I traced ACPI.sys spikes to a GPE handler that sleeps + bad dGPU power logic.

Full deep-dive: Report

[Mikei]

Zephkek. I hope your research find recognition and a solution! 😊

[Flo]

Thank you so much for all this work. 

My Strix G16 is affected by random stutters since day 1 and have never been able to find the real root cause.

Hopefully Asus will react positively.

[Lavernee]

Spend some more time to research 😊

[ArminWylin]

My Zephyrus m16 2022 is also affected i hope if they see this they dont only just push the update for new laptops and actually fix older 2021+ laptops too.

[Zalevskiy]

This is also because of the built-in mechanism for protecting the drivers, which can be bypassed by setting either the oldest drivers close to the date of production of the board, or those who were previously production of the board for 1-6 months (from the similar model of the laptop)

This unnecessary technology is annoying if you want a high -quality sound, but the firmware rules force you to always update the system and drivers, and the quality of these drivers is worse and worse. I was forced to sew the BIOS on my own spi programmer and put the Chinese Windows to finally get rid of BSOD. And the support service recommends that I sit on the latest broken bios!

I froze my laptop in a 22h2 state, blocking all updates and everything is fine. But if I update the drivers or the OS will begin big problems.

I do not know what will help us except the miting. It’s how to buy a Bugatti with a broken speed switch, and in the service center you will be required to be 4300$ for a simple inspection, and then they will offer to replace the entire motor for half the price of the car, although the pre-block in the fu**ing gearbox lever!

[ElectroStingz]

Just thought I would try this to see what happens during gaming, video for reference purposes and maybe it is useful.

One odd thing I noticed, the touch pad when active causes massive spikes especially when it's used so I disabled this in armoury crate. Apart from that this is almost standard software wise and minimal tweaks to windows, CPU settings are not standard.

[R4zen]

I have a similar issue with my ASUS TUF Dash F15 FX517ZC: high latency spikes even during simple web browsing. I don’t get sound crackles, but rarely and randomly my system hangs for a few seconds. The mouse still works, but the system doesn’t respond, as if the SSD drive or its controller stops working for a moment, sometimes accompanied by a “beep” sound.

When I change the Optimus GPU mode from Standard to Ultimate, I experience millisecond stuttering, freezing, or lag while scrolling with the mouse or typing on the keyboard. It’s so annoying that it prevents me from using this mode anymore.

[R4zen]

I also had problems with the CPU core speed. Often, a few seconds after logging in to Windows, my CPU speed drop to 0.43 GHz, causing the system to become almost unresponsive. At first, I thought it had frozen, but after a while I noticed extremely delayed reactions. When I checked the Task Manager performance tab, I saw all cores running at 0.43 GHz and almost 100 % usage on only four threads. 

I'm not sure what caused this. At first, I thought the CPU temperature might be too high and the fans had stopped working, but everything turned out to be fine. If I remember correctly, it started after a some Windows update or a driver update, but I can’t say for certain. I fixed it by running ThrottleStop at startup (configured to launch with the Windows Task Scheduler), and since then the CPU speed hasn’t dropped like that anymore.

[Silent_Scone]

Posting this here for visibility