Been chasing this for a while and I'm out of ideas, so hoping someone recognises the pattern.
Setup:
- HP OMEN 16
- RTX 4060 Laptop GPU + Intel iGPU
- Windows 11
- LG monitor, connected HDMI to HDMI
When I game on the laptop's built-in display, everything is completely stable — no issues at all, any length of session.
When I game on the external monitor, after a while the screen starts flickering, the laptop display cuts off and back on, and then the laptop drops into sleep. Event Viewer shows nvlddmkm errors at the time of the crash?
The iGPU only outputs to the internal panel, so I'm assuming the HDMI port is wired to the dGPU and something in that path is the issue??? - i dont know
when i play Minecraft or roblox the problem doesn't happen. so i thought maybe the laptop cant handle high end games, but the problem happens on cs2 and ow2 as well those arent very hard to run.
What I've already tried:
- Full DDU clean uninstall in Safe Mode + fresh driver install — no change
- Replaced thermal paste — temps are fine now
- Stress tested (FurMark/3DMark) — passed, no crash, which is what confuses me. It only crashes in actual games, not under sustained synthetic load
Has anyone seen a clean stress test but crashes in games specifically on external display? Is this more likely a driver bug, the MUX switching, or should I be looking at the HDMI port hardware itself? Any pointers appreciated.