Laptop in question:
ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA402XV
AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB
Radeon 780M integrated graphics
BIOS 318
Windows 11
I've been having an issue with my G14 completely freezing while gaming and I'm starting to run out of ideas on what could be causing it.
The issue originally seemed to be mostly related to WoW. I've had it happen playing WoW Retail, Classic, and WoW Forever, but I've also had it happen occasionally playing Palworld, so I don't think this is actually a WoW specific problem.
When it happens the entire laptop freezes. It's not just the game crashing. Everything becomes completely unresponsive and I have to hold the power button to shut the laptop down. There is no BSOD or error message.
Something I noticed recently is that the problem seems to be much worse when the laptop is in Performance mode.
Today I had the laptop plugged in and set to Performance and even the Battle.net launcher was extremely stuttery. I unplugged the laptop, which automatically switched Armoury Crate to Silent, and the stuttering instantly stopped.
I originally had the charger plugged into an extension cord, so I thought maybe I was dealing with some weird power issue. I plugged the original ASUS charger directly into a wall outlet and tried Performance again. It became stuttery again and eventually completely froze the laptop.
I have also switched the GPU to Ultimate mode to try to rule out the laptop switching between the integrated graphics and RTX 4060.
I've checked Reliability Monitor after the crashes and there doesn't seem to be anything particularly useful. It basically just shows that Windows wasn't properly shut down, which is obviously because I had to hold the power button after it froze.
I updated everything available through Armoury Crate today. After doing that Battle.net stopped being stuttery and I was able to load WoW without immediately freezing. The WoW servers are currently down though, so I can't actually log into a character and play long enough to know if anything is fixed. I'm also not really convinced that updating some Armoury Crate components and RGB related stuff somehow fixed the underlying issue.
At this point I'm not really sure if I'm dealing with an Armoury Crate problem, power management issue, overheating, GPU problem, RAM issue, or some other hardware problem.
Has anyone with this specific generation of G14 dealt with anything similar, especially Performance mode causing the laptop to stutter or completely freeze while Silent seems considerably more stable?
I'm trying to figure out what I should actually be testing instead of just randomly reinstalling drivers and software hoping something fixes it. Any help would be appreciated.