Envy x360 Ryzen Crashes

[proxyx]

Seems Acer shows how to take care of their customers. HP is, as always, miles behind.

What's interesting, browsing AMD.com driver categories one could draw a conclusion that Ryzen 5 / Vega 8 mobile doesn't exist at all. Couldn't find it in any category. Is this something that AMD is ashamed to admit it actually released?

I can find all sorts of old, legacy hardware or junk, yet AMD's newest pride and joy is nowhere to be seen... is it bound for a landfill already?

[zt7301]

It is really weird. I did find our lowly, unimportant, laptop apu referenced under the optional downloads of the desktop driver page... down under NVMe RAID drivers ( AMD Ryzen™ Mobile Processor with Radeon™ Vega Graphics). I don't exactly see what the point was of supporting NVMe raid on laptops before a basic reference display driver... I'm not even sure how you would do NVMe raid on a laptop...

Seems I was mistaken about the "driver packaging version" being the chipset driver versions... it appears they assign a packaging version to every package of drivers. Not exactly sure why one driver needs to have 3 different version numbers assigned to it (Like the latest desktop one has: 18.2.2, 17.50.17.04, 23.20.15017.4003). So another head scratcher. But maybe theres something I'm not considering here.

It also seems that HP is confused about their own products, because we keep getting intel based drivers and bios updates on our 15m-bq1xx support page. As far as I am aware, there is no intel variant of the 15m-bq1xx... Maybe someone is confusing the 'q' and 'p' keys on their keyboard?

I did catch the bios update for our machine, F.16 before it was replaced and sent to the "previous version" tab by an incompatible bios version F.07. I haven't noticed any performance difference or new options in the bios. The F.16 details simply say "Provides enhanced security". Extremely informative... Assuming this has something to do with the Spectre vulnerability.

Other than that, I've still been running the 23.20.815.0 display driver from the windows update catalog since my last post. Gives good performance and operating stability. However, I still get some odd graphical corruption in Outlook when I wake the computer from a screen off state, just like with every other driver. Not sure if this is the driver's fault or Outlook, as I don't get this with any other programs. I've got two bluescreens on cold bootup so far. I think it might only be occuring if forget to close Skype for Business when I shutdown and let it autoload with windows 10 1709's "feature" of auto application restart when the computer boots up again, ignoring my preferences of not "automatically starting the app when I log on to windows".

It appears that my hope that AMD would release our mobile driver on their page along with the new desktop APU drivers was in vain. I did download the desktop APU drivers and took a look in the .inf file to find that it appears to use the same ati2mtag_Raven driver as our mobile APUs, and the hardware IDs have the same DEV_15DD number, but different REV numbers. I didn't attempt installing, as my system is finally stable and performing good, so I don't want to mess with it unless I see another driver with a compatible hardware ID.

[proxyx]

Interesting, but even with Outlook or Skype blue screen seems to be too harsh of a punishment. May be showing some incompatibility although quite bizarre.

Check your gradient if you'r not getting any banding (test charts). 655.0 and 655.2 were not giving me clean transitions.

Eizo test is indispensible here (backlight, banding etc.).

There is an Intel ver. of x360 which I decided not to buy, it came with nice LG display (possibly the best, beside AUO, I've seen both) even though I could not test it for bleeding (store too bright).

Reason: keyboard and body were silver with very faint letter prints on keys (light blue on silver... what a great idea). Desided to pass. It was i5-8250 or higher. Hardwarewise I would prefer it any day. Have an Acer like that, brand new. In over 1 month not a single hiccup unlike Ryzen 5. Day and night.

Comes with different configs 4GM mem. +HDD or 16Gig mem +SSD though and no MX150 unlike Acer.

15M-BP011DX on US site or  HP ENVY x360 15-bp108ca,

in Europe too.

http://store.hp.com/CanadaStore/Merch/List.aspx?sel=NTB&ctrl=f&fc_form_conv=1&fc_form_deta=1

Cheers

[zt7301]

No crashes or bluescreens with Outlook, only corruption. Like when I wake the computer from having its screen off, the title bar is stretched completely across the whole ribbon menu. As I move the mouse over where the buttons are, they show up normal, and if I resize the window everything goes back to normal. This has been my experience with every driver version so far. I just tested Skype for Business and can confirm that I get a blue screen if it loads immediately after a cold boot. If I wait a minute and load it, no problem. Blue screen error is VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR. Since I often don't load Skype for Business until after the system has been running a while, this problem may have been present in other driver versions as well, and I just didn't notice it. Definitely bizarre, as otherwise the system has been completely stable with this driver version, and I put both the CPU and GPU sides of the chip through some serious torture both with my drafting/raytracing, as well as some games on the weekend.

I guess I should consider myself a lucky one, as I haven't experienced the banding or other display problems others have mentioned. My system has a BOE screen. Other than some light bleed at the edges, its been a great display. I went through the Eizo tests and didn't notice anything.

I saw the intel version x360, with the similar product ID: 15M-BPxx vs 15M-BQxx. This is why I was thinking maybe an HP employee was confusing the two when uploading drivers to the support page. I checked out the 15M-BPxx support page though, and their driver versions are completely different from the intel ones being placed on the 15M-BQ page, so there goes that theory. I have no idea why they keep placing intel drivers/BIOS on the AMD version's page.

[proxyx]

Seems Skype needs a specific module loaded first. Aside from the fact that it CAN be a real pain in the butt regardless of version.

Well HP still did not fully digest the fact they have a Ryzen laptop in thir product line and that is also reflected here in the forum, no surprise. Good you're happy with your display, I'm kind of on the fence (also BOE) due to little too much bleeding for my taste, but I went through 4 BOE and 2 Chi Mei and got tired of it (ridiculous I had to go through this). Settled for the last one and I can say with full confidence that HP QC must have been on the leave for quite some time since display quality consistency is simply not there, to put it lightly. 

In dark lit room these displays are worse than my 6 year old laptop, both in terms of backlight bleeding, but also punch, color and white balance. It is kind of acceptable, but far from being good. Reviews confirm that as well. None qualifies HP x360 displays as good, prevails adjective "mediocre", and that's the bitter truth. I'm very sensitive to display quality, means to me more than CPU power.

Going back to drivers... can you say Acer driver works better than 655.1, no issues, stutter, pixelation, videos, YouTube OK? It shows as what ver.?

[SumMortuus]

I've only had one crash and it came soon after installing the acer drivers.  Nothing really seems to be too different.  I've installed the HP. Tried to update with the adrenaline software from AMD as each rev has come out, but they no longer seem to have compatible drivers.  You have to go to the previous revs around the end of December to load anything.  I've also installed from Acer as mentioned above and the windows catalogue.  I STILL have pixelation and discoloration from youtube, but only when it's full screen for longer than a minute.  Youtube seems to also mess up if it's just in the window and I scroll away while playing and then scroll back.  The regular windows vid player seems to work fine.  I've never had an issue with office products not refreshing on wakeup either like others though.  IDK, I have some false hope there will be one last update sometime right?

[xxalazin]

They are for the acer swift 3 find the one vga driver from AMD it's the only one there. I installed through the device manager they are 3072 dated nov 2017. I have no issues running games youtube or anything so far.....

[proxyx]

I'm not for cooking my own drivers, not my job. There are ppl who get paid for that and I expect they put their back into it.

2 users and 2 different results with acer drivers... don't know if it's a waste of time or placebo... fault is clearly on AMD's side, they were always lazy and rather happy with mediocrity. Plagued with tons of issues and bad press for ages they seem to be tired, lost and helpless. HP has it's own issues... they wash their hands seeing AMD is doing squat. Laptops are sold, main thing... cash is in the bank... and whether you spend an hr with them complaing means nothing, cost of doing business. In short all of them don't give a **bleep**, that's annoying.

[zt7301]

Yeah, still waiting for the people who get paid to make drivers to give us some that don't crash. I think I've narrowed down the one remaining bluescreen issue with the 23.20.815.0 driver from the windows update catalog to something to do with hardware acceleration of video after resuming from sleep (shutdown counts as a sleep state in windows 10 with fast boot enabled). Turns out skype for business utilizes hardware acceleration of the video and must be initializing it when the app is first run. Unfortunately, I see no where to disable the hardware acceleration as a temporary fix, so if I need skype for business, I reboot first. I had hardware acceleration turned off early on in my browsers to prevent issues, as that was crashing the 22.19.655.1 driver as well. I found a toggle to turn it off in Outlook, and that solved the weird corruption issue I was having there.

At least with knowing the limitation of video hardware acceleration, I can avoid problems. But it would sure be nice to be able to use the laptop as intended. I imagine if I could properly utilize video hardware acceleration, my battery life would probably improve a bit.

[proxyx]

So now we have HP, Acer, Lenovo and Dell Ryzen drivers, and by reading comments I can say that none of them works as reliably on HP x360 as Intel/Nvidia, plain and simple. Loooks like AMD rushed with sH*t product, not ready for primetime, 4 computer makers bit the bullet and here we are... begging for a working driver while tech support is having a beer party.

I wonder if other makers' expertise is higher in implementing this pile of c..p, that some call drivers. Would need to check other support forums, but HP seems to be totally oblivious so far. Next time I'll invest in a better company, they don't deserve my money.

On the side note, how happy you guys are with webcam on x360 that seem to be a pinnacle of garage developed HP technology. Cannot reconcile it even with the worst and oldest webcam in my collection. It beats everything I've seen so far. Off color, noisy, blurry and useless... is my description accurate or not?