HP Omen 15 laptop crashing and BSOD both during idle and gaming

Hello. I have had my HP Omen 15 gaming laptop for about 3ish years at this point. Around January I began to have intermittent crashing while playing Monster Hunter Rise. Usually the game would just freeze and crash, requiring me to alt-tab out and close it. However after a few weeks it began to crash during other games and even while idling. Some of these crashes caused my screen to go black and forced a hard reset and others were BSODs. I tried some fixes with no luck before posting on the Microsoft forum (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...9-2f742f729378). From that it was deduced it was a GPU driver error so I removed both the integrated AMD and discrete NVIDIA drivers with DDU and reinstalled them. I then had no crashes for about 1.5 months before they returned and have become more frequent. I tried to remove and reinstall the GPU drivers again with no success. I was also recommended another suggestion to do an "in-place upgrade" which I also did with no luck. The only other potentially related thing I could think of is about a year ago the keyboard on this laptop began to fail. I looked into it and from what most people were reporting it looked to be a hardware issue so to work around it I ended up disabling the keyboard and just use a wireless one. I used the instructions found on this website to do so (How to Disable a Laptop’s Keyboard on Windows 10 - Appuals.com). Thanks in advance for any help.

System Model: OMEN Laptop 15-en0xxx
Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics (16 CPUs), ~2.9GHz
RAM: 16 GB RAM (two 8 GB sticks)
Storage: 1 TB SSD
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti
Version 22H2 OS Build 19045.2965

V2 results:
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Well, there's good news and bad news in these dumps.

One of the dumps references a well-known BSOD cause in the call stack; the vgk.sys driver. This is the Valorant anti-cheat driver and it often causes BSODs (all the anti-cheat tools do).

However, none of the other dumps show any third party drivers on their call stacks and this is usually indicative of a hardware problem.

The really bad news is that one of the dumps has a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT bugcheck - this is almost always a CPU problem. Unfortunately it can't be fully analysed from a mindump, and the kernel dump will have been overwritten by more recent dumps.

I would suggest you run Prime95 to stress both your CPU and your RAM. This will cause your CPU to run hot and that's always a problem in a laptop. Before you start make sure that all air grilles in the laptop are clear. If you can, open up the laptop and clean the finned heat exchanger next to the fan - this is where all the cooling is done, you need a good airflow through there.

Also download a temperature monitor (like CoreTemp) and keep that running with Prime95 to keep an eye on temperatures.

Run all three tests in Prime95 (small FFTs, large FFTs, and Blend), each for a couple of hours if you can. If Prime95 reports any errors, if the laptop crashes or BSODs, or if the temperature gets too high, then stop the test and let us know what happened. TjMax for your Ryzen 7 4800H is 105 degrees C, so anything over 100 degrees and you should consider stopping Prime 95.

Thank you for the help. I will look to do the stress test as recommended sometime within the next couple days when I have some time where my computer won't be in use as I have a travel coming up on Monday. In the meantime, I am unsure if this will help but I also was recommended to do a diagnostic when I asked about this problem on another forum which I ran over the night and got some results which I attached below.

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I have also taken the laptop apart to clean out the heat sink as recommended and took some pictures of that incase there was some defect there I wasn't aware of.
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Had some freetime today so was able to run all 3 tests. The small ran with no issue, temps mostly stayed around 88-95 with the occasional peak at 100 before going back down. The tests all said pass in result. The large initially ran for about 30-45 minutes before crashing/BSOD (I wasn't looking the exact moment it occurred so not sure which although the reliability monitor said its a BSOD) The blend ran similar to the small with no issues, the only difference is that the temp spiked to 101 for about 4-5 minutes before going back down once. Thanks again in advance for the help.

MisterEd said:

You said your computer sometimes crashed even when idling. Do you know what the CPU temperature was when idling?

Did you say you ran Prime95? If so, as the CPU temperature increased did the CPU fan ramp up to cool the CPU? If it did you should have heard it. The computer should not BSOD if the CPU reached max temperature. It should have thermo-throttled. That means the CPU speed should automatically decrease to keep its temperature below its maximum.

The idle temperature is usually around 32-34. When I ran Prime95 I did hear the fan ramp up and get loud. And good to know moving forward regarding opening it up. I pretty much just removed the back panel and heat sink based on the instructions of a few youtube videos and then just removed the dust there. I made sure not to touch anything else since I didn't want to mess something up accidently.

MisterEd said:

32-34C? My AMD Ryzen 7 6800H CPU idles around 55-65C.

Your AMD Ryzen 7 4800H has a max temp of 105C. My AMD Ryzen 7 6800H CPU has a max temp of 95C. If I run Prime 95 the temp is 93C after a few minutes. The fans ramp up enough to keep the CPU speed constant without slowing down.

It is up to you but if it was me I would back up my computer and reinstall Windows.

BTW, I had a problem with my other laptop. The WiFi download speed went from 300-400 Mbps down to 40-50Mbps. After a few months I gave up trying to find a way to fix it. Reinstalling Windows 10 fixed that problem. Unfortunately, it then had a new problem. The audio was garbled when I watched a YouTube video. I then had to reinstall Windows 10 a second time. Now it works OK.

I may end up just backing it up and reinstalling Windows then because weirdly enough I have had very similar issues to the ones you mention as well. My Wifi download speed would also randomly go down throughout the day even though it worked fine on my phone and my audio would also randomly get staticy and fixing it requires me to go into the speaker properties and turn audio enchantments off and on.
Apologize if this is an obvious question but I am not the most tech savvy but in terms of backup and reinstall all I need to do is just make sure to copy my personal files to an external drive just incase and then go to reset this PC and say yes to keeping my files?

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Well I ended up reinstalling windows, no crashes on idle so far at least but haven't had the chance to game on it yet since games are currently redownloading but hopefully this fixes it as otherwise I presume this means I have a hardware issue

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Looks like I spoke too soon as it just BSOD while idleing. I guess that means its likely a hardware issue then? Sucks because this laptop is out of warrenty.

Can you please change the power plan to HIGH PERFORMANCE and see whether the BSODs cease? I've seen this kind of problem before, a CPU that performs well under load (as yours does) but which BSODs at idle.

When a processor goes into the idle state (because there's no available work for it to do) the power state of that processor is lowered in order to save power and reduce heat. It's not uncommon for some processors to become unstable at these lower power levels and BSOD when they're asked to come out of the idle state whilst running in this low power state. This would explain the CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD.

Running the laptop with the HIGH PERFORMANCE power profile disables these low power states, and the processors are all run at max power all the time. This will use more battery power and the laptop will run a little hotter, but if it doesn't BSOD then you know you have a CPU that is flaky in low power states.

ubuysa said:

Can you please change the power plan to HIGH PERFORMANCE and see whether the BSODs cease? I've seen this kind of problem before, a CPU that performs well under load (as yours does) but which BSODs at idle.

I will try this and see if it makes a difference.

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Well I changed it to High Performance and played some games throughout the day with zero issues however about 20 minutes ago it BSOD again while idle. The error message this time however was IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL which I don't recall seeing before. Another observation I have noticed is that it always crashes/BSOD while plugged in however this laptop is plugged in during gaming sessions which is when the majority of the crashes occur but the times it crashes while idle it happens to be plugged in as well. I didn't think it was pertinent but at this point I am fed up with this laptop, never going to by HP again. I redid the v2 collection again incase that would help but I'm thinking at this point its a hardware issue and am gonna have to take it into a shop.

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Looking at those two recent dumps I still think you have a CPU that's flaky at low power states. I suspect the only resolution a shop can/will provide is a new CPU.

Since it's a laptop I doubt the BIOS allows you to disable C-States but there is a registry key that allegedly disables the low power C2 and C3 states that you can try if you feel up to it. I've not tried or tested this, so it comes with no warranty from me. Disabling these processor C-States will however keep the processors at full power and this should(!) mask the problem.

1. At a command prompt, run the following command:
2. reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Processor /v Capabilities /t REG_DWORD /d 0x0007e066
3. Restart the computer.

To revert back (ie. to turn C-States back on again)...

1. At a command prompt, run the following command:
2. reg delete HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Processor /v Capabilities /f
3. Restart the computer.

Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...9-58d9062fd566 (Note that this article is for a completely different problem, but the C-State disable hack is applicable).