Since purchasing a 7640U AMD Framework Laptop 13 about 6 months ago, I’ve been experiencing intermittent hard crashes in Windows 11 when the laptop is in sleep mode. I would leave the machine for a few hours and return to it having rebooted and all my programs having been closed. This has been a persistent problem plaguing my user experience and it has become very annoying to have to constantly reopen my applications when leaving the FW13 unattended for a few hours. This behavior does not occur every time the computer goes into sleep mode. It usually happens about once or twice a day, and I can go for a stretch of a few days without it happening if I’m lucky.
After poking around Windows 11 to find clues on what was happening, I found in the Reliability Monitor application that the cause of the reboot during sleep was a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD. There are three critical events logged in succession:
Windows stopped working
Windows was not properly shut down
Windows shut down unexpectedly
The third event is highlighted and when viewing the details, that’s where the BSOD is shown:
Problem signature
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
Code: 133
Parameter 1: 0
Parameter 2: 500
Parameter 3: 500
Parameter 4: fffff805ccfc33a0
OS version: 10_0_26100
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1
OS Version: 10.0.26100.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID: 4105
I ran the WhoCrashed application to get more details on the BSOD and it showed that error code 133 was a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION.
I did some research online and found that the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION was a common issue causing hard locks and crashes when the AMD FW13 was first released last year. It was supposed to have been fixed when the 3.05 BIOS was released in April 2024. This is obviously not the case for me, as I am still experiencing the BSOD.
As the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION error is related to hardware or drivers, I have tried troubleshooting (to no success) the issue by doing the following:
Update the AMD chipset and Mediatek WiFi drivers to the latest version.
Turn off PCI Express link state power management in Power Options.
Replace the Mediatek RZ616 WiFi card by the Intel AC 9260 WiFi card.
Rollback drivers to the latest October 2, 2024 Framework driver package.
Run memtest86 to rule out faulty RAM (no errors found)
I have found a few other instances of people having Windows 11 crashes during sleep that seem related to what I’m experiencing:
I’ve started seeing this issue recently with my FW13 AMD. I was getting this issue several times a week prior to the 3.05 bios, but after the new bios was released it largely fixed the problem for me.
But in the last few days I’ve started having this issue again, random resets/shutdowns with the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION. I think it might be related to the Windows 11 24H2 update that I did recently but not entirely sure.
It really sucks as it makes this laptop very unreliable.
Contact support on this. I have the 7840u and was having both random hardlocks while using the machine and crashes on sleep. They ended up replacing the mainboard in my laptop which resolved the issues.
Good to know that I’m not the only one experiencing this. I also installed Windows 11 24H2 shortly before noticing that this problem occurred more often. That could just have been a coincidence, as I’ve had this issue before installing 24H2 as well.
I don’t think this is a hardware defect that needs contacting support though. I configured my FW13 to dual boot Windows 11 and EndeavourOS. The laptop seems to behave just fine when I’m using EndeavourOS, with no random reboots during sleep. If I had issues with both OSes, then I would agree that this could be a hardware problem.
After digging into my Windows crash dumps, I figured out that my recent uptick in crashes was due to a recent update of a VPN app (Mullvad). So also in my case it isn’t directly a HW issue but there might be something with the FW13 bios/drivers contributing to the issue as I have another PC running the same app that doesn’t exhibit these crashes.
That’s a very interesting find! I also use Mullvad as my VPN. I will try using Windows 11 without the Mullvad application running to see if the frequency of the sleep BSOD decreases. If Mullvad is the cause, the release that could have caused this issue must be older than 2025.01, as I’ve had these crashes occurring in 2024 too.
Yes, it seems as if your connected using Wireguard while the laptop goes to sleep you’ll hit the watchdog exception. Here’s the issue described on the Mullvad github:
The frequency of the crashes seemed to increase with the latest app release for me, but maybe it’s just a coincidence. Looks like this issue has been open for almost a year now.
I’m happy to report that I haven’t had the sleep BSOD in the past week, since I switched Mullvad VPN from Wireguard to OpenVPN. I’m relieved the problem was software and not related to the Framework laptop itself. The random reboots during sleep was a huge annoyance as it made the laptop unreliable.
Thank you @amfw25 for figuring out the cause of the problem!