ChemistZombie

Final update. Unfortunately it seems like this laptop may have a faulty motherboard which might have been the reason why the iGPU is unstable. I noticed that if I attach a USB flash drive into any of the ports, it sometimes randomly disconnects and reconnects, even when the laptop is left idle. I've tried three different drives to make sure it's not the flash drive that's faulty and the same result happens every time. Some kind of power delivery issue perhaps? It seems like I will have to return the laptop to the seller after all. Sorry if this turns out to be disappointing if anyone's looking for a solution to this. Seems like mine happens simply due to a bad motherboard which would've cost almost as much as the laptop itself if I were to repair it.

After setting the page file to 32GB and not running Discord in the background, it seems like it has become slightly more usable because I was able to run the game for a little over 3 hours without crashing. However, just to check to see if it's really stable, I decided to install and run OBS to record a match replay and unfortunately after a short while, the game crashed again. I wouldn't really call this "stable" because IMO if you can't run multiple programs like that without the display driver crashing, then it's not too usable. Granted, I'll get an eGPU enclosure in the future, but I'm just worried that this may eventually get worse, as I do plan to daily drive this for a few years since it's easier to maintain than newer laptops as it has a removable battery, soldered RAM, and an empty WWAN slot that can be used for M.2-2242 NVMe SSDs that use B+M key. I did manage to capture a footage right when it crashed though. Given how the cursor still moves after the display driver was restarted, and I was using Quick Sync to capture it (which relies on the iGPU), it doesn't seem to affect OBS as badly as OW2. I was expecting it to also throw an error but I was able to stop the recording with no issues. I launched the game again after the crash but left it on the main menu this time around (because I recall the game crashing on the initial loading screen once), and I've yet to see the dreaded "render device lost" error message after leaving it overnight, so increasing the page file did seem to have some effect on stability, but not completely address it. Apparently someone on Reddit reported that BIOS version 1.49 might cause some hardware issues, most of which didn't occur on mine, but I'll still try reverting to 1.48 to see if it does anything. I probably don't need 64GB RAM to be honest. I do work with music production and FL Studio during my free time, and while 16GB just barely cuts it, I think 32GB is enough for the type of music I make (opening several Kontakt libraries, Serum patches, Omnisphere and several effect plugins) because I don't usually use that many plugins in a project file. The laptop is still within a return period though, so if all else fails, I think I'll just return it because I wouldn't want a laptop that only partially works, especially if this turns out to be a hardware issue. 2023-11-05 17-08-21.mp4

I don't think I'll be replacing this laptop anytime soon, and by the time I do I probably would've bought one with DDR5 instead, so I guess 2400MHz RAM is fine. No, it doesn't seem to have any renderer settings I can change. It's only DX11. I've been running the game for about 2 hours now with 32GB page file and no crashes so far, although it did seem to freeze momentarily at one point before going back to normal, but at least it's progress from a complete hang and crash. Should've clarified that this is a preowned laptop. I mainly use this for office tasks because I wasn't able to bring my PC with me to the apartment I moved in recently, and the Acer laptop I used to own is completely busted with broken hinges and missing plastic bits so I can't really use that. Really only bought it because it's cheap ($200), has decent enough specs, and durable as it used to be a high end business laptop (I'm pretty much bummed with how fragile the Swift 3 was). Gaming is just an aside when I'm bored or have nothing to do these days. The plan is to temporarily use the iGPU and then get an external GPU enclosure once I can afford it, since it has Thunderbolt 3.

The laptop was preconfigured with 1x16GB RAM from the seller. I may try getting 2x16GB sticks later because I'm aware that this may cause some performance penalty, even if it uses an Intel CPU/iGPU. It is otherwise stable though given how it completes Memtest with no errors. I'll try to increase the page file to see if it helps. I usually leave it to system managed because that's usually more than enough, but I'll see if configuring it to a high value like 32GB helps. Already reinstalled the game, verified game files, deleting the game's cache files. I did a clean install of Windows 10 because it was previously running Windows 11 and I've heard it might cause some issues. The game still crashes even after all those things. I did run Afterburner because OW2 seems to build shader cache when I initially run it and wanted to monitor the CPU/GPU usage with the overlay to see if it has done doing that, as the game was unplayable during this state, constantly hitting 100% load on all cores, but after this I can get a somewhat playable frame rate of 30-50FPS at 720p low settings. I did a clean Windows 10 reinstall just a few hours ago, so I've yet to reinstall Afterburner. I don't have OBS on either installs. Also I run the game without any browsers open, just Discord. And BTW, the thermals are fine. The CPU temps never seem to exceed 85C from what I've seen with the Afterburner overlay. Perhaps the iGPU might be faulty but it only happens when a very specific type of load is applied? It's weird though because it never seems to suffer from artifacting or visible graphical glitches. It simply times out and restarts every time.

I've been having an extremely weird and rare problem with my newly purchased laptop where the iGPU (UHD 620) would timeout and crash ONLY when running Overwatch. This has left me completely stumped because I've thrown in some stress tests to check for instabilities and every single one of them passed with no errors, but it seems like if I try to run OW2, it would crash at random intervals, on one occasion it even crashed when it was on the initial loading screen. Upon investigation it seems like the iGPU driver times out and restarts whenever this happens (TDR recovery), which causes Overwatch to crash and show a "Your rendering device has been lost! Application closing!" error message. I've tried running Prime95 with both small and large FFTs, all OCCT tests including CPU, GPU, RAM, and power stress tests, Furmark, Memtest86, and even running 3DMark Time Spy overnight and all of them passed successfully with no errors. I tried running other games that can run on an iGPU such as TF2 and Minecraft, but they run just fine. I've uninstalled Avast because I remember having issues with it with my old PC build, switched between driver versions (latest driver from Intel, latest one from Lenovo, and even some older versions), and I even did a clean install of Windows 10 because I initially put Windows 11 on it and thought that might be the issue because Windows 11 felt slower during my short time of using it, but no luck. I'm running out of ideas on how to fix this, because from my experience, if there's a hardware problem, stress testing it would've revealed the problem fairly quickly, whether it's the CPU, GPU, RAM, or other parts, but not this time. The laptop runs at completely stock settings. I've yet to make any adjustments that might have caused instabilities such as undervolting it. The only thing I did was to update the Thunderbolt firmware version to v23, because some Thinkpad models from the late 2010s have a serious Thunderbolt firmware bug that will eventually cause it to kill itself if the firmware version is below v20. The BIOS automatically updated itself to v1.49 after installing Windows for the first time. Specs: Thinkpad T480 i5-8350U UHD Graphics 620 1x16GB DDR4-2133 256GB SATA SSD Windows 10 Pro x64

Interesting. I thought the only things that would affect a drive performance are RPM and cache. So this means that even if the Skyhawk has 5900RPM, it still suffers from some performance penalty due to its less cache and firmware, right?

So I'm currently looking for a new hard drive to replace my 2TB WD Blue that's failing on me, and I found these two drives that attracted my attention. Originally I wanted to get a 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM since, well, it's got 7200RPM, but none of the stores here have it in stock for some reason (perhaps they stopped shipping them here?) so I'm stuck with either a 4TB Seagate Barracuda or a 4TB Seagate SkyHawk. The drive will be used mainly for game storage. Note that I already have an SSD but it only has 120GB of space, which isn't that great. Also, WD drives are out of the question because they're too expensive here. Now I know you might think that putting in a SkyHawk hard drive, which was supposed to be a surveillance drive, into a regular desktop, is quite a silly idea, but here's the thing: the SkyHawk is a tiny bit cheaper here for some reason at only $110 (IDR-USD conversion), as opposed to Barracuda's $112 price tag. Also, the SkyHawk has 5900RPM and 3-year warranty but only has 64MB of cache whereas the Barracuda only has 5400RPM and 2-year warranty, but has more cache at 256MB. WD drives are out of the question since the 4TB Blue drives are only rated at 5400RPM, has only 64MB cache and 2-year warranty while having a very little price difference at $108, and none of the Black drives are in stock here for whatever reason, just like the 7200RPM Seagate drives. Ignoring the fact that it's a surveillance drive, should I just get the SkyHawk instead of Barracuda? I mean it's better in almost every aspect but the cache. And would the 256MB cache in the Barracuda help me in any way for gaming?