DPC latency-related BSODs on high processor load (Dell laptop)

[Darthagnon]

Greetings.

TL;DR
I've been having trouble with my laptop completely freezing, accompanied by "sound tearing/buzzing" then going to an unresponsive BSOD, when the processor is heavily loaded. I have tested the DPC latency, and LatencyMon reports "it's bad", so I suspect it may be something to do with that.

My specs:
Dell Inspiron 7577 Gaming (2018 laptop)
Win10 v1709 64-bit (very out-of-date, I know; OEM installed, no Windows updates since (on purpose))
16GB RAM
Intel i7 7700HQ
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 MaxQ (Drivers: v445.87)
(more details in "Vortigern.txt" Speccy report, attached)

Details:
I first noticed the problem when playing Monster Hunter World, and have been able to reliably induce the problem in a couple of minutes via MultiMC Minecraft, running some mods and Optifine Sildur's Shaders (both CPU-intensive games/situations). The PC will freeze, sometimes with purple/green lines on the screen, and BSOD (or orange-screen, thanks Win10), with WHEA_UCORRECTABLE_ERROR. I use an undervolt, by -0.1553V on the CPU Core, Intel GPU, and CPU Cache via Throttlestop; I currently have this disabled, to test solutions, and it has no effect as far as I can see. I also checked with LatencyMon and DPClat, and both showed bad latency spikes; I had previously noticed this as occasional mouse freezes and audio freezes during YouTube binging, (and possibly the cause of dropouts in cassette-to-MP3 conversions that I'm running?). I saw a few drivers highlighted by LatencyMon, and have been trying to fix it, but have reached the edge of my capabilities.

- [FIXED] HDAudBus.sys: I enabled MSI mode for it in the registry (it was off), by following this thread: System interrupts, Latency, HDaudbus.sys - it no longer appears as a latency cause
- ACPI.sys: I have had no luck fixing this one, but it appears 99% of the time as the cause of the latency
- storport.sys: once, after resuming from sleep
- i8042prt.sys: once
- Wdf01000.sys: occasionally, but from my research, a very general driver, and one that others depend on, so another is probably the cause

I have also uninstalled SmartByte drivers and all Dell (OEM) bloatware, with the exception of Dell Power Manager (to keep "battery for AC use" charging limit function), Dell Mobile Connect, and Dell Product Registration (NB no Dell processes show in Task Manager or Process Hacker).


I saw and followed several threads dealing with DPC latency on this forum, so thought it might be worth turning to you and asking, "Please, can you help me?" I have taken a stack trace/dump with the Windows Performance Recorder, but have no idea what I'm looking at in the Windows Performance Analyzer (this is attached as a Google Drive link; be warned, it extracts to 970MB in size!). I'd sure appreciate any advice or help! Thank you!

Attachments:
Please find attached to this post:
- Sysnative BSOD Collector Report
- LatencyMon report
- Speccy report ("Vortigern.txt", Vortigern is the name of my PC)
- Windows Performance Analyzer stack dump (I've seen in other posts with DPC latency problems that this was required; WARNING! it unzips to 970MB in size!)

Other places I've asked about this issue (it's been a few months):

• [Help] Win10 BSOD when running high processor load (?)
• https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/ffkg3b
• [a well-known forum, link to topic available on request]

 

[Darthagnon]

Here's DPC latency from before I disabled the Dell services:

https://imgur.com/a/uwKHEDA

Note that while the worst DPC latency from here is fixed, some still remains, so it's a little outdated.

I've also just done a DxDiag.txt

 

[Darthagnon]

I just checked my BIOS settings, and discovered, to my surprise, that it's set to RAID mode (I don't use RAID), rather than AHCI. I've seen switching to AHCI in the BIOS recommended as a fix for high DPC latency; do you reckon it would work for me? Is there a working way to switch to AHCI without reinstalling Windows (e.g. do you know if this method would work)? I don't have time to reinstall Windows and all my programs atm, and have a lot of messy data that isn't backed up yet.

 

[xilolee]

Create a system restore point and a system image (if you didn't already have them) before this change!
This should be simpler:
- Click start, type msconfig, press enter, swicth the the tab to boot, tick safeboot (minimal), click apply.
- Reboot to enter in your bios settings, change raid to ahci, save the settings and boot in safe mode.
- Click start, type msconfig, press enter, swicth the the tab to boot, untick safeboot (minimal), click apply.
- Reboot.

 

[Darthagnon]

Thank you so much for the instructions! Glad to know that method should work! I'll do a backup and post back here with the outcome next week or so.