HP Pavilion 17-cd0020nw locks up in games

[HoloTheWise]

Greetings,

I bought my laptop back in Feb 2020, so it's still pretty new. I've been able to play all the newest and demanding games at the highest possible settings with no problems whatsoever, in mid-August I switched to League of Legends and have not booted a demanding game for over 3 months. Now just a week ago I've decided to return to CS:GO and in the course of 1 game (40 minutes or so) I've experienced 3 complete system lockups. The laptop became completely non-responsive and I had to long press the power button to turn it off and back on again. This has happened to me before with an indie game called Crying Suns at the end of August, but I simply thought the game was somehow buggy and didn't bother with it. But after that time with CS:GO I've decided to test it further and ran games like Overwatch and Apex Legends, and surely enough, all of them lock up my system after 10-ish minutes.

A few things I've noticed about these lockups:
- They tend to occur when I alt-tab out of the game or if the game exits from the match back to main menu (all 3 occurences in CS:GO were one of these). However, if I continue playing for a sufficient amount of time without alt-tabbing, the lockup will eventually occur on its own.
- The sound tends to bug out ("brrr" effect as if it were seamlessly looping a very, very short (~0.1 sec) sound). The screen, however, does not. The current picture just freezes in place.
- GPU temperatures are around 80 degrees when this starts happening. I used MSI Afterburner to monitor GPU temperature in Apex Legends and was alt-tabbing quite frequently to check the readings, and if I alt-tabbed and saw GPU temperature to be around 79-80 degrees, there was a pretty high chance that that alt-tab would cause the lockup. Overwatch, however, has a convenient feature of an in-game GPU temperature indicator. When playing Overwatch without alt-tabbing the lockup occured at 81-84 degrees. On lower settings, however, when GPU temp stays below those numbers, lockups never occur (League of Legends is very undemanding).
- I've run my GPU through an Xtreme burn-in test in Furmark at Full HD and 8x MSAA for 20 minutes and the temperature didn't even reach 80 degrees (79 max), despite load being shown as 98%. The GPU clock used was also displayed as around 900-1000 MHz, as opposed to 1500-1600 MHz in games. I must say though, Furmark did lockup my system once and sure enough it was caused by an alt-tab.
- CPU temperatures did not even reach 90 degrees at all times.
- Fans were not spinning at full speed. For some reason they spin much faster when in BIOS or even at full speed during a BIOS update, but never in games. Interestingly enough, the fans don't stop spinning nor do they at least slow down when a lockup occurs.
- Windows event log does not show any anomalies. It only displays a critical event warning every time I have to hard reset the laptop because, well, that's what it is - an unexpected shutdown. The time correlates with the time I'm pressing the button, not the time a lockup occurs.
- Yes, I have run a full hardware diagnostic with an official HP utility. Everything checks out.

One thing I've also noticed is that Hard Disk Sentinel shows my SSD health as 24% (performance at solid 100% though) just after 14,72 TB written. After I restart my laptop because of the lockup it shows that the SSD temperature is 60 degrees, which is a red zone. I don't know if it is significant, but I do intend to eventually RMA my SSD, seeing as I have 13 more months of warranty ahead.

Below I'm listing some hardware and BIOS specs:

CPU: Intel Core i5-9300H @2.40 GHz
Motherboard: HP 85FE
BIOS: Insyde F.33 (updated today from F.20 in hopes of solving the issue, did not help)
GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q design (driver ver. 457.30 Nov 6th 2020) / Intel UHD Graphics 630 (driver ver. 26.20.100.8141 April 11th 2020)
RAM: 8 GB
SSD: SK Hynix BC501 HFM512GDJT

No hardware installed/replaced.

I'd really appreciate help, since at this point I've tried almost everything short of a factory reset to see if it isn't, in fact, a software issue, or just sending the laptop to a service center since I have warranty.

Regards.

[The_Fossette]

@HoloTheWise

I reviewed your post and I understand that the system lock-ups when you are playing games and press alt-tab.

Don’t worry, I assure you I will try my best to get this sorted.

I recommend you follow the below steps and check if it helps.

Right-click your desktop background and select NVIDIA Control Panel. You can also find this tool by performing a Start menu (or Start screen) search for NVIDIA Control Panel or by right-clicking the NVIDIA icon in your system tray and selecting Open NVIDIA Control Panel.

To quickly set a system-wide preference, you could use the Adjust image settings with the preview option. For example, if you have old hardware that struggles to play the games you want to play, you may want to select “Use my preference emphasizing” and move the slider all the way to “Performance.” This trades graphics quality for an increased frame rate.

By default, the “Use the advanced 3D image settings” option is selected. You can select Manage 3D settings and change advanced settings for all programs on your computer or just for specific games. NVIDIA keeps a database of the optimal settings for various games, but you’re free to tweak individual settings here. Just mouse-over an option for an explanation of what it does.

Let me know how it goes and you have a great day!

P.S: Welcome to the HP Support Community 😊

If you wish to show appreciation for my efforts, mark my post as Accept as Solution. Your feedback counts!

Cheers!

Stay Home – Stay Safe

[HoloTheWise]

Hi, thanks for replying.

I've already tried the method you're suggesting. Sadly, it did not help. Moreover, as I mentioned before, the lock-ups don't necessarily occur when I press alt-tab. I am not sure what are the prerequisites for this occuring, but lock-ups also happen without alt-tabbing (I played Overwatch without alt-tabbing on purpose and it still locked up my system after 10-ish minutes).

Moreover, since my original post, new glitches have begun occuring. I've been experiencing browser tab crashes (I use Firefox) with literally just one tab open. One time the tabs even crashed whenever I searched Google for anything. Plus I've noticed Discord application has begun restarting on its own on several occasions and several times I've even experienced my screen flickering (Event Viewer later confirmed that that was Nvidia GPU driver running out of memory).

I have performed a factory reset and it did not solve the problem. I've run full hardware diagnostic with official HP software and it did not uncover any problems. Windows RAM diagnostic and chkdsk did not reveal any problems, either.

[The_Fossette · Accepted solution]

@HoloTheWise

I recommend you contact support to further diagnose the issue.

Here is how you can get in touch with support.

1)Click on this link – www.hp.com/contacthp/

2)Select the product type.

3)Enter the serial number of your device or select let HP detect your product option.

4)Select the country from the drop-down.

5)You should see the HP phone support number or Chat option listed.

Cheers!