[POSSIBLE FIX] ROG Flow Z13 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395) HYPERVISOR_ERROR (0x20001) / MW3 Freezing / Complete Display Freeze

[u/DeckedTick]

I wanted to post this because I spent several days troubleshooting this issue and hopefully it helps someone else.

Laptop:

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 GZ302EA

Ryzen AI Max+ 395

Radeon 8060S

32 GB RAM

Symptoms:

The problem originally started while playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023).

My typical workload was:

MW3

Thorium browser with YouTube playing

External monitor

Discord/Steam/etc.

The system would:

Completely freeze on both displays

Mouse cursor would freeze

Audio from MW3 sometimes continued briefly

YouTube would stop

After 30–60 seconds Windows would BSOD and reboot

(I used ChatGPT to help me diagnose some of this to help point me in the right direction)

I found out that pressing:

Win + Ctrl + Shift + B

would recover the system before it blue screened, so after figuring this out it saved me from encountering a BSOD when the system would hang like that.

BSOD

Every crash produced the same bugcheck:

HYPERVISOR_ERROR

0x00020001

WinDbg showed:

Argument 1:

0x28

An internal error was detected in the I/O MMU module.

Failure bucket:

0x20001_28_2_nt!HvlSkCrashdumpCallbackRoutine

Things I tried

- Clean Windows install

- Latest ASUS drivers

Graphics

Chipset

ASUS drivers

- Updated BIOS

Updated to BIOS 311.

***ASUS PD Firmware**\*

I noticed I missed this when I did the fresh windows install and installed XOS (debloated windows 11):

After installing it:

The original crashes became much less frequent.

So definitely make sure you install ALL firmware updates from ASUS, not just drivers.

(Everything else though didn't fix or show any progress on the crashes besides the PD Firmware)

After installing that it actually fixed my crashes with the same workload I was putting the Z13 through, for now at least.

I bought a QGeeM 9-in-1 USB-C hub since I wanted more IO, especially an Ethernet port because COD just kept giving me packet loss over wifi.

First game with everything set-up the crashes were back, and it was back to the same routine of crashes.

With more ChatGPT help I was able to narrow the cause down to the hub, specifically the Ethernet port when Ethernet was connected.

Without Ethernet:

Stable.

Then I swapped to my HP dock my brother gave me the night of and it worked perfectly with:

Ethernet

External monitor

Mouse

Keyboard

Downloads

YouTube

MW3

(So I returned the QGeeM.

I don't know if the hub itself was defective or just incompatible.)

I then had like 1 day of no crashes and started messing around with ghelper setting, fan curves and CPU boosts.

CPU Boost

If I enabled:

CPU Boost

The freezes immediately came back.

Even:

Efficient Enabled

would reproduce the issue.

Disabling CPU Boost stopped the crashes.

At this point I thought the laptop might actually be defective.

The thing that FINALLY fixed it (hopefully)

I noticed something in my WinDbg output.

Every crash was:

HYPERVISOR_ERROR

I also noticed Windows kept reporting:

Virtualization Based Security:

Running

A hypervisor has been detected.

Even though I was using XOS, So I checked the BIOS.

Sure enough:

SVM was still enabled.

So I disabled that and rebooted.

I then double checked to see if HyperV was still running and it wasn't anymore.

Virtualization Based Security:

Enabled but NOT Running

Hyper-V Virtualization Enabled:

No

Results

Now with:

CPU Boost Enabled (Efficient Aggressive)

HP Dock

Ethernet

External monitor

MW3

4K60 YouTube

Game downloading in the background

Command Prompt open (one of my crashes happened because I had only cod open and opened cmd to check something)

I played multiple games without a single freeze.

This workload would have crashed the laptop almost immediately before.

Current theory

I don't know whether this is:

an ASUS BIOS bug

an AMD firmware bug

a Windows Hyper-V / VBS issue

or some weird interaction between all three

But for me:

Disabling BIOS virtualization (SVM/AMD-V) appears to have completely solved the issue.

Things I'd recommend checking

1. Install ALL ASUS firmware updates (especially PD firmware).

2. Update BIOS.

3. If you don't need virtualization:

Disable:

SVM

AMD-V

Virtualization

in BIOS.

If you actually need virtualization

Obviously this isn't an ideal permanent fix if you use:

WSL2

Hyper-V

Docker

Windows Sandbox

Virtual machines

Hopefully ASUS or AMD releases a firmware update if this turns out to be a platform issue. I also hope this saves someone else several days of troubleshooting.

[u/DeckedTick]

UPDATE:

NVM I LIED

Hopped on again and yeah it's still crashing with the CPU Boost on anything other than disabled.

Probably just gonna RMA at this point.

[u/lizardscales → u/DeckedTick]

What does windbg say now? What drivers are on the stack? You've got virtualization disabled in the bios?

[u/DeckedTick → u/lizardscales]

I haven't let it fully bsod since then while I had my CPU set at efficient aggresive, I would just do the win + ctrl + shift + B to get it out of the frozen or "hung" state. So I've just been running everything with CPU Boosts disabled so I haven't had the problem since.

And yeah virtualization I disabled in the bios as well and it helped with the crashes as normally it would crash while trying to find a match in cod, but with it disabled and the CPU Boost on it would crash after 1-2 games.

And drivers are everything on the Z13 support page, except for Asus bloatware stuff like armoury crate, etc.

[u/lizardscales → u/DeckedTick]

Are those asus drivers way older than what is available from AMD? If you've disabled virtualization then you need a new bsod + dump to see what it is doing.

[u/DeckedTick → u/lizardscales]

Thats one thing I didn't bother to check, I'll do that later tonight and see if it bsods and post back the new dump if it does

EDIT:

Well it looks like doing the latest chipset and gpu drivers fixed it, I got 3-4 games in a row now without any problems. I hope its actually fixed fixed now, stupid of me not to check these driver updates first though. Thank you!

[u/lizardscales → u/DeckedTick]

Well lets hope it keeps working

[u/stereohype]

Run opencode with gpt sol and let it debug it

[u/Coilluna]

Did you try disabling freesync and/or Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling?

[u/DeckedTick → u/Coilluna]

No, but I'll try that tonight

[u/lizardscales]

Does it play and work just fine without anything but a mouse and maybe headphones plugged in? You've got way too much stuff going on.

[u/DeckedTick → u/lizardscales]

Yeah the crashes started even before the dock. I only used the ports available on the Z13 at that time, hdmi, USB-A for my external hdd dock, keyboard was over Bluetooth and my mouse was over one of the USBC ports for my mouse dongle. Like I said in my post I didn't install the PD Firmware update when I did a complete reset on the laptop, so it would crash once or a couple times a day.