Aurora R12, Clock watchdog timeout error

A fix that some others have reported great success with: r12 (overclock and speedstep turned off in the BIOS)

Another fix is updating the video card drivers directly from Nvidia. They just released a new driver I believe yesterday, always worth a try. You can always install your previous drivers if it does not work out for you.

Give these 2 options a try, see if it helps.

If not I would run an online test to see if any hardware errors are present: DELL diagnostic tools online 

If all comes back ok, you will likely have to contact technical support to see if they can assist you with this issue.

Pending on the warranty status of your machine, you might want to do this earlier rather than later.

I have not had the issue for 4-5 days since setting OC 2 in the BIOS.  I am still running XMP1 for the RAM.  Interestingly, in Alienware Fusion, it registers "zero" for CPU GHz and CPU temp. 

What a headache! My new R12 (11900kf, 64GB ram, 3090) arrived last Wednesday and it never ran for more than 20 minutes under any kind of load without either a Machine Check Exception or Clock Watchdog Timeout crash. I spent hours on the phone with Dell Support over several days. We reinstalled Windows, changed BIOS settings, messed with OC settings, downloaded fresh drivers for almost everything, etc. and nothing worked. They also told me to always keep the fans on "performance." Really?! My PC needs to sound like a jet engine when it's idling or I'm just working on a spreadsheet? Come on, man!

I've had Alienware since 2008 and loved all of them. Maybe I'll try again in a few months, but my new R12 was nothing but frustration and disappointment. I returned it for a refund today.

I encounter the same issue too, recently just bought R12 with RTX 3090 and 32gb ram.

My wife and I ordered a R12 in 11900KF 3080 with 32 gigs each and both systems are having the exact same issue I am seeing described here. Blue screens any time we load up games. I've tried most of the fixes I've seen suggested here and nothing has helped. It went a day without a blue screen, and then I ran a benchmark and wouldn't you know it? Blue screen. 

I see a lot of people on here saying they got 32 gigs of ram. I am curious, how many of those are the 3400mhz? 

could this be related to poor cpu cache performance and very high ram latency? Aurora R12, Unacceptable BIOS/Z490 configuration, 11th Gen Intel CPU's (RocketLake) - Dell Community

Does your game have a log file that will give you some kind of idea why your crashing. In DCS we have a log file and also a crash file. Have you tried disabling any overclocking in AWCC and msi/af ? Then retest . Just a thought.

Yes, I went into the bios and disabled the overclock option. I haven't used the oc in the software at all. We even reinstalled windows and updated all the drivers but it hasn't made a difference at all. We are pretty much in ownership of two expensive paper weights. Think I might return them at this point.

Sorry I hadn't returned to this post, I've not had a bsod since I went into the alienware command center and disabled the cpu and gpu overclock that it shipped with enabled. Left my ram overclocked. Been running a month with zero issues now. 

My friend and I both got 11th gen Intel R12's around the same time and we've had nothing but problems. We've tried everything to stop the watchdog errors including clean installs of drivers and even Windows. The one thing we have not attempted to do thus far is install an older firmware.

About the only thing that kind of helped was to disable ALL overclocking in the BIOs. After that the hitching in games stopped and now we get a BSOD about once every six hours rather than every 1-10 minutes after starting Windows or launching a game, like it was doing right out of the box.

Mine finally stopped giving BSOD after taking several of the steps I have seen here and reinstalling Windows. I currently have all of the updates, the overclocking is enabled in bios at level 2 with XMP2 on, but the overclocking in the Alienware app is disabled.

My wife's computer, however, is a different story. It has only gotten worse and gets more than the watchdog clock timeout. We we reinstalling Windows for her and it blue screened in the middle of it and have nothing but problems since. I got her some parts from the local best buy and found an AMD 5800x for her and built a whole new pc. She had to settle for an RTX 2070 for now but its running better than the Alienware. I am going to return hers. Its nothing more than a paper weight right now.

Same issue but infrequently and sometimes when shutting down.  Expensive computer considering my cobbled together old DIY never had this issue 

Short time  solution :  

Power on and Press F2 to enter BIOS setup

Press F9 to load BIOS default then click OK in order to clear OC settings.

Press F10 to save and exit.

After the system completed 2-3 times power cycle. Press F2 to enter BIOS menu again.

Please go to the Advanced page.

Click Performance Options. You will see the Overclocking Feature was Disabled. Drag the list and click Enabled.

After Enable the Overclocking Feature. Please Select OC LV2 like below:

Confirm your OC settings like below: (Note! The TRLR value will be 49 for i9KF, 50 for i9K)

Press Save and Exit to save profile and restart system. Now the OC has been set to LV2.

This should prevent any further  Blue screen errors . 

As a  long time fix , A  BIOS Update will be released soon

Thanks bro, this worked for me