Locks up while Gaming 2024 G16

[JackofAllTrades]

I bought my  4070 g16 at the end of November, I keep everything up to date and check Asus website for new bios and other updates regularly. My issue is when I play demanding games sometimes (usually once a day) it just locks up. I can hear my friends on Discord and they can hear me. The game audio is still playing but they say I am just standing still. I am pretty sick of the issue and having to hold down the power button until it shuts down and restart everything again feels rough on my expensive computer. Does anybody have a solution? Also, Ghost Recon Wildlands only works if I turn off all efficiency cores for some reason. I have tried every combo and only the first 6 power cores can be on. It's the only game that does that. 

[ElectroStingz]

Hello,

What have you tried so far?

I would always start with temperatures as these can cause issues like freezing, for instance if the GPU overheated you can end up with a blank display but the PC/laptop still functions in the background. 

So as a starting point what are your temperatures like? I recommend hardware monitor for this as it will show a lot more sensor readings that are good to know. https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Probably best to take some screenshots of the whole thing when idle then try a game for say 10 minutes just to get an idea of where the temps are at. What CPU do you have in this laptop? A default 14900HX will see 90+ Deg C and your 4070 on uncapped FPS will also be around 80+ Deg C.

When playing games are you set to turbo fan profile in Armourycrate? If not give it a try and see if it makes some difference, alternatively use a manual profile and max the fans out just to see if it lasts any longer.

As to Ghost Recon Wildlands, just to see what happens on my laptop I gave it a go (ROG STRIX G16 14900HX, RTX 4060) and it worked without issues. There are some reports online of E-cores not working with this game but maybe it's a conflict somewhere. I'm using a clean Win11 24H2 install (MS ISO and not a backup / ASUS recovery) but more on this later as I think the freezing is more of an issue atm.

[JackofAllTrades]

I believe the issues with ghost recon come down to the 185h in my machine. I came across a few people with the i9 and i7 versions having start-up issues similar to mine.  Now with heating it never goes above 90s for a few seconds but sits in the 80s normally. It has always had this issue and don't think is heat-related unless the factory liquid metal was installed wrong. I don't know how to read the event viewer but it shows things logged. 

[ElectroStingz]

Post some of the event viewer screenshots as this may help (you can upload images here), same for hardware monitor over a period of 10 mins as this will show other temperature sensors, eg

CPU Package
P-cores
E-cores
VR temp

GPU Temp
GPU Memory Temp
Hotspot Temp

Chipset (PCH) Temp

Assuming these are all good is there any pattern to the freezing? for example when you switch out, alt-tab to another window or when you quit the game? Some issues also happen when the GPU switches modes from the nvidia to intel. (you can try setting the laptop to use the dGPU only, in the BIOS there will be this option for preferred GPU, set it to dGPU).