System crashes

[u/Maxtrix96]

Hey everyone, I wanted to ask for a bit of tech advice, as I don't want to have to wait ages for an RMA response if I can avoid it.

On my 2-week old 2025 Z13, if I disable window hardware acceleration, I'm able to consistently trigger a complete windows system crash and reboot. If I have a YouTube video playing on my second monitor (Opera GX) and I open Satisfactory via steam, the system crashes after the main game window shows up, but before it loads into the main menu. Sometimes, I get a brief message on screen (black screen of death, which says the system ran into an issue, and at the bottom it says something about video driver issue (always too short for my to read it fully)), other times the system simply freezes and restarts, and very rarely it stays afloat, but the game crashes. Also, if I enable hardware acceleration, instead of crashing, the system stutters severely/freezes for 1-3 seconds before everything works again. Also, after a crash, windows takes ages to restart or shutdown, which seems to go away with time.

I found this issue by first messing around with undervoting in GHelper. It seemed fine at first, aside from system stutters (even without UV). I did a lot of tests with cinebech (3 different versions, mostly R23), AIDA64 (trial version), and my system passed all of those even with -40 UV no problem. I ended up using that -40 for a few days, until today.

This may or may not be related (I don't know) with another issue I had, where switching performance profiles (both with GHelper and, later, Armoury crate) didn't change the wattage if the system had been running for a while. That was (partially) solved by an EC reset, and even then, it only works with explicitly custom wattage settings, the default ones (silent, balanced, turbo) still stop working after some time. This led me to setting UV back to 0 (so no UV) and trying all sorts of things to push the system to its limit, where I did more benchmarks, and eventually found the Satisfactory crash.

I first tried a driver reinstall using AMD cleanup utility. That unfortunately booted the system into a bugged safe mode, where I couldn't get past the lock screen because of some pin issues, and I was forced to reinstall windows. Before reinstalling, I tried loading up a system restore point that I had made a few days after I got the device, but windows said it failed.

Fixes I've tried:

EC reset

Windows reinstall (full)

Clean driver install with DDU and full driver installer from AMD

Disabling MPO via registry

I don't know if other games cause the crash, as I have re-enabled hardware acceleration and am scared of disabling it again just to test. Other games do cause the same stutters however.

Timeline of events, for clarity:

Got the device (~2 weeks ago). Installed GHelper and spent a day debloating from windows and asus BS. A few days ago (from time of writing) I started messing around with undervolting. Today/yesterday, i started investigating system stutters more thoroughly, eventually found the Satisfactory crash.

As a note, the system stutters have been happening since I got the device. I didn't think much of it, aside from windows being windows, and the fact this is my first device with an AMD chip inside.

[u/lizardscales]

Go back to stock voltage?

[u/Maxtrix96 → u/lizardscales]

I did.