AW17, GTX 1080 + g-sync, horrible stuttering in games.

Took delivery of the new 1080/g-sync equipped 17's last week. Win10 pro installed.

I have terrible freezing / stuttering during games. They'll run fine for a few minutes, then the screen will start freezing for a second or two before stuttering its way to recovery and running normally. This cycle then continues every 30-60 seconds until the game crashes or I restart it. Audio is usually unaffected but sometimes will start crackling. DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) monitor shows that the nvidia kernel mode driver is having some horrible latency (8000+ microseconds, which is really high), but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the driver or even the card at fault (as far as I understand these things). GPU-z logs aren't showing anything unusual.

Dell support are trying to convince me it's a driver issue, but I've thrown five different nvidia drivers at it, updated everything else (intel chipset, SATA, network, flashed BIOS etc.), disabled g-sync, tweaked CPU and GPU power/performance settings in just about every permutation and NOTHING has made a difference.

Is anyone else having the same issue? More importantly, is anyone else running this GPU / screen / OS setup and NOT having these issues? I can't see how this is purely down to drivers if other instances of this machine are running trouble-free...

 

Does it happen with G-Sync disabled ?

 

disabling g-sync makes no difference, it still freezes and stutters.

 

I have the exact same system freeze and hang issue with my AW17R4 with 6820HK and GTX1080. I believe is is thermal related and when your CPU hits into the mid 80s even on one core, the system begins to throttle the TDP to the CPU and GPU causing utilization to drop to 0% or a second, thus causing your freezing. I have tried literally everything to remedy this issue but unfortunately have not found any solution. I've gotten a motherboard replacement, LCD replacement and still have the same issue. Intel XTU and Throttlestop tweaking for the power limits do absolutely nothing. Adjusting the PL1 and PL2 in BIOS does nothing. I've even repasted the CPU and GPU with thermal grizzly conductonaut liquid metal TIM and the issue still persists. I've tried every single BIOS available from 1.0.1 to 1.0.12 to no avail. I believe this has something to do with the hidden BDprochot option in BIOS that can't be disabled. This is going to be an issue until Alienware realizes that their preset throttling temps are total ******** and increases the limit with a new BIOS release. Until then, we will either have to wait patiently or sell our systems and tell Alienware to go **** themselves with their sub-par overpriced garbage.