GTX 1060 Laptop Freeze / Hard Lock in Shadowlands

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Plenty of threads out there already with similar performance / crash issues so far this year, though haven’t found anything that’s worked for me yet, hoping there may be a slim chance someone else has found something else to try.

Currently using a RoG Strix Scar with 8th gen Intel Core i7 / GTX 1060, which has been used since just before BfA was out. Have not had a single crash / performance issue like this until about early November 2020 after the 9.x prepatch released. Unlike many with h/w or driver issues, played through all of the 8.3.x content totally fine.

WoW will randomly hard-lock / freeze my laptop at random spots during play, can be as little as 2-3 mins, can be as long as 2 hours between crashes (always a total hard-lock, have to hard-power off and on every time.) Haven’t seen any stuttering / artifacting / micro-freezing others have at all previous to this, or during. Appears to occur anywhere in the world, not just SL zones.

Have made sure I’m using current drivers for everything, have done both a full reinstall of WoW and Win 10 at this point (build 20H2), have tried eliminating all other running apps, no effect. Crash doesn’t appear to occur at any other time other than while in WoW except for a single time when this freeze occurred while bnet was loading up after a reboot (about 4 days ago). No other apps, level of load on cpu/ram seem to cause the issue.

No bios setting differences (e.g. turning on/off Virtualization items, power management) make a difference. Windows is running in performance mode for any power / nvidia settings that matter. Neither wired network / wireless or using wired vs BT headset matters.

Macros disabled, wow performance settings on a 6, have tried DX12/11/11 legacy and messing with any of the advanced settings, no change.

Am using M.2 nvme Samsung 970 SSD, upgraded to a 2TB vs a 500GB, different ram, no change in either case. Internal CPU/gfx fans appear fine and working.

Typically I find SFC or DISM will find/clear issues after enough crashes, but unsure if that’s just a side effect; no significant info in event viewer that’s pointing to anything.

SO at this point I’m willing to try just about anything - have had like 200+ freezes in the last 3 weeks or so, have ruled out everything save the mobo / gfx (but as stated, no freeze in where except WoW), so unless it’s part of the ‘known’ WoW gfx issues this year or the nVidia drivers since about April 2020, I’m at a bit of a loss.

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Sorry to hear about the crashes :frowning: I just helped a friend last work through some crashing issues and so far the crashing has stopped entirely. They were originally crashing every hour or so. Their issues seems to have been related to software conflicts. Based on the system specs you have, I can only assume that your peripherals(keyboard and mouse) are something fancy as well, possibly even a razer device. If you have similar devices such as corsair peripherals, I would try to do the same thing as the below razer steps but just with corsair being uninstalled/reinstalled and checking for driver updates for the devices.

I would honestly uninstall razer entirely from your system if you do have it and to reinstall it using only the basic stuff like the Chroma and macro stuff and to not get cortex or the extras.

Though, before reinstalling, I would try playing without it installed at all for a while to see if it still crashes. Disabling the Xbox Game Bar streaming/recording settings will also help(all windows 10 pcs has this enabled by default and is known to cause issues such as crashing). You can find it by typing Xbox Game Bar into your Windows search(windows key on your keyboard).

If you are actively using discord, I would disable any overlays, and to disable the hardware acceleration in the video settings.

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All good suggestions; I should add after the full reinstall, I was playing with only Windows and Wow installed (same behavior). I don’t use any Razer equipment currently but I do have a Steelseries Sensei and an Arctis 3 BT headset (no change there, either). I did also disable discord / game bar overlays in my original install AND after the reinstall, no change. Using a plain wired headset or no headset, or a plain mouse (or just the touchpad, ew), no difference.

Even w/o Discord / Twitch / addons even installed, no change. :frowning:

I did read notes in basically every nVidia driver release in 2020 that has a note near the bottom -> ‘Some Pascal-based notebooks w/ high refresh rate displays may randomly drop to 60Hz during gameplay.’ The GTX 10 series is indeed that chipset (and this is a 120hz laptop screen), so I tried some other folks’ advice and set the foreground / background FPS to 60, and then 30, also removed the auto setting, didn’t seem to change anything. BUT I do wonder if the nVidia ‘laptop may randomly drop frame rate’ issue may directly be causing the crash in concert with 9.0.x, as many others have had some form of performance issues relating to drivers or DX11 vs 12 this year…

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Hrmm, odd request, but have you by chance tried checking your Laptop power settings?

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/34359

It’s possible that your system might not be using it’s full capacity. The other issue is that it “might” be overheating? I would make sure that all of your vents are open and not being blocked by anything, even a little bit.

Hopefully you can find a fix.

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always have my stuff set to performance settings, anything relevant to battery life is disabled. Also, fans are working fine, and I can, say, open a raft of tabs in Chrome to get my CPU / memory usage up, no issues there

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Might be best to reach out to Customer support through the technical pages and give them your MSinfo to see if they can find anything of value that may cause issues.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/12988

I would also be as clear as you can when you reach out as to what you have done already so they do not overlap with what was already tried.

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Hey Aryall,

I would agree with Veroux’s last recommendation there, in that submitting a ticket for crashes and including your DXDIAG and MSINFO files is probably the best way to go at this point. That way one of our Technical Specialists can look everything over to see if any obvious issues stand out.

I will say though, that hard system freezes like this (that don’t even result in an error code or Blue Screen crash) can point to hardware problems or issues with the BIOS. If you haven’t started a support ticket with the laptop manufacturer you may want to get that going as well. If it’s a newer system hopefully it’s still under warranty in case it needs work done.

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So I ended up having my first crash-free evening in quite awhile (fingers crossed) after installing kb4586853 on 12/1 (for 20H2 in my case), which addresses a typical litany of issues, a few of which were memory leaks (yesterday morning I got the MEMORY_MANAGEMENT GSOD for the first time before coming across the update). This is the 2020-11 Cumulative Update Preview for Windows 10 Version 20H2 (a similar kb is available for build 2004), so we’ll see if it did the trick.

I’m normally pretty meticulous about keeping up-to-date (which does present its own challenges now and then), and this KB doesn’t indicate how long the issues have been present (or if they were introduced in a previous patch), but I’ll take it.

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I’ve been having the same issue and so has a friend so you’re not alone. This only started over the last week for us so something has changed. I’ve gone through all the troubleshooting, reinstalled everything from scratch and still getting hard locks. Weird thing is - it doesn’t happen with any other game. I can play COD or Assassins Creed for hours with zero issues. It’s something wow specific but I can’t figure out what it is.

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Did you ever figure it out? I am in the same boat.

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I am having a similar issue as others. It started after the patch 2 weeks ago.

I will be playing (world quests, exploring, Torghast, The Maw) pretty normal things I do every day and my pc will ‘lock up’. I can still run around but I can’t interact with anything. Mobs can see and attack but when I try to respond, it’s as if I’m lagging. I can’t pick up any interactive items during this behavior or click NPC’s. I can do a manual ping to the designated Blizzard servers for my region and I also ping CloudFlare and Quad9 DNS servers with no lag (no time outs and response time is the same as when there is no apparent issue).

I have provided copies of my MSinfo, MTR, DXDiag and HWMonitor to Blizzard twice in the same ticket ( US77349915) but neither rep has referenced these files or appeared to have actually read my ticket.

The 1st response told me to provide the files (which I had already done when I opened the ticket).

The 2nd time it happened after opening the ticket I uploaded the new files and also let them know that I had dc’d after this incident. The rep seemed to focus on this, instead of the lock up/freezing aspect. The rep did not mention looking at the files I uploaded and instead told me to use a ‘wired’ connection, which I had already told them I was using.

I’ve made sure that I have the most recent addon downloaded. I only use a handful-DBM, GTFO, Titan Panel, Bartender, Pawn, AdiBags, TomTom, Postal and Raven. I turn off the DBM modules I don’t use.

My graphics card drivers are up to date. All Windows updates are applied. This is a repeat of a situation that happened this same time last year. That ticket was open for almost 3 weeks. There was so much information and troubleshooting on that ticket that it had to be closed out and a new one created. As part of the work on that ticket, the entire game was reinstalled.

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Hey same issue, did you figure out what was causing it?

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No. It still happens. The only thing Blizzard suggested is that I should talk to my Internet Provider because they saw some congestion at one hop of MTR. Even though I never see ‘red’ numbers for my FPS, World/Home server, etc. when this is happening. Even though if I just do a straight ping to the same IP’s as the MTR, I never see drops or huge MS numbers. It happened last night in the middle of a Torghast run. I think I had been logged in for about 1.5 hrs at that time, and in the run maybe 45 minutes.

Tonight - 1/13/2021 - I jumped into the Maw from Oribos and nothing happened. My character disappeared off the screen and all I could see was the inside of the tunnel at Oribos. I could type in Guild chat and there wasn’t any lag but my character was no where on the screen and I couldn’t hearth. Again, I had to kill the wow.exe in Task Manager and log back in.

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I figured it out, well someone else did but I tried it and havn’t crashed once. If you have downloaded Exorsus Raid Tools remove it. Someone said that it was freeze locking the computer with our GPU drivers. I thought I would give it a go, and sure enough it has so far fixed it.

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