XPS 8940, lock up issue with every Bios > 2.3.0

@ark628 

Fans speeding up, you might be the only one with that, maybe one or two others, but others almost all have a plain lock-up, either with the XPS sitting idle or doing something, really almost anything has been reported, running a browser, Zoom, Netflix, opening a desktop icon, closing a window, trying to wake it up from sleep, you name it.

I have NOT changed any BIOS setting from the Default other than using AHCI for the SSD, and Capsule Update and left everything else are the defaults, and for sure, not changed the C-States.

These are the ONLY Windows Updates past 8/12:

No drivers or anything else (I'm on W11 Home), so other than me installing the Nvidia drivers using GEForce Experience and NOT changing anything, I have no clue what else has changed? I use Revo Uninstaller and set it to show Installed date. Only think that was even close to be something to think about was on 8/12, my first fail on V2.9.0 which was a DELL UPDATE update...

Dell there are dozens of threads  like this.  XPS 8940 freezes any BIOS >= 2.4

This one describes the issue quite well.

@ark628 

Sorry but I don't think any of us have a clue to the cause nor the remedy. Everything tried turns out in the end to not be the remedy.

You can find in the various threads supposed remedies and none hold up. The eXtensible Host driver is based on the link, https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Gaming-Desktops/Lenovo-Legion-T5-28IMB05-constantly-gets-severe-freezes/m-p/5077386?page=1 which was started well before BIOS V2.4.0 was released, and is still going strong now as it is still a problem even with the driver disabled.

I thought too it could have been the RAM rank as I had Single. I upgraded as I increased my RAM from 16GB to 32GB's and replaced the Single rank RAM with Dual Rank. Worked well for a few days and I thought that was it, then got the lock up.

Switched to BIOS V2.9.0 and got a lock-up immediately. 4 days later, another one. Then, for some unknown reason, from 8/15 to 9/14, NO LOCK UP, until it happened again? Huh??? Tried to find what could have been installed in that time period, besides on 9/1 a new Nvidia driver? The day before, 9/13, Windows Update added some files... and I suspect possible one of those?

A day later, on 9/15 another lock up, but none since?

It is totally random, and the cause is unknown and depending when it happens, you might think you know why or what to suspect. Not the case, it seems whatever it is is still there waiting. This is more like a timing issue to me or some specific set of circumstances that happens to cause it.

Software does the same thing every time you run it based on the flow which in some cases require a return from another process. Somewhere, some program or process does something different from other times and one of those 'changes' is probably, if not the problem, the root cause of the problem.

I have NOT done a majority of the 'fixes/remedies' proposed here. Only one was the RAM Rank and it didn't fix it. Would like to buy an 16GB Single Rank DIMM I'm not using?

Oh, it also appears Dell has NOT recreated the problem either. They did offer to exchange XPS's with some people but all it seems didn't like the conditions so declined (I was one of those). Now they don't seem interested in doing that anymore, don't know why?

Keep in mind, back in Jan., when BIOS V2.4.0 came out and Nvidia users hit the lock up problem, why then, with no changes to the XPS at all, but reverting to BIOS V 2.3.0 SOLVED the LOCK UP (some call it a Freeze) problem? No change but the BIOS and included sub components, like the Intel Management Engine that could not be back-leveled, fixed it... That points the finger in the direction of the BIOS code, not Nvidia card or drivers. Yes, the problem is unique to Nvidia owners, but NOT all of them either. To me, this alone rules out the Host Driver.

Honestly i dont think so.
Since i had track what exactly i changed and how often the PC Locked up i had a serious decrease of Lockups.

What i assume why it wasnt a thing previously is that the eXtensible Host Driver has a coeffect with the changes in the Bios since 2.3.0. Also indicating that my lockup had the fans spinning makes it a little different here.

As said i previously had lockups since 2.3.0 and on a daily basis. Means when the PC was On during night and i got back after sleep it would have locked up definitly.

Issues keept appearing even with 2.9.0. The one thing i changed since that was explicitly this.
I even delayed my CUDA installation etc. specific for this purpose

Of course testing cant promise the abscence of issues but as far as i see the state of my
machine is much more stable and reliable with one Lockup since.

As said i assume that there are multiple issues with this type of machine and most of them
come down to the following root causes:

Powermanagement (either PSU Wattage to low or general power issues with how the system handles idle etc)
Drivers (i.E. the said Driver that isnt even used in my GPU model. Funnily this driver is also marked by the system to "can stop to save energy")
Broken Hardware (i hadnt had this case in this PC but i also exchanged my RAM with no success exchanged the SSD with no success etc.)

Honestly this change is the first thing that showed any effect and im trying around with this issue since i updated initially to 2.4.0.

In my case i had NONE of the Lockups with the Fanspeed since the deinstallation assuming that there are at least 2 lockup issues with the XPS.
Also since the way the PC freezes with no log etc. hints that the issue is very close to the base of the machine i.E. unhandled exceptions on driver level.
The Lockup is no "usual" lockup since there isnt even any crashlog or info what happened to the system.

Ive even checked with a thermal camera to see if there are any heatspots somewhere in the PC. => Of course nothing unusual.

I will monitor how many lockups i get in the next few months and if nothing occures anymore im going to assume that the driver is simply not compatible with the system and
that the PSU might get an upgrade at some point altough the 500W PSU is okay the Dell Stock ones sometimes have huge issues. i.E. my Alienware Graphics Amplifier had total JUNK as PSU inside.
Under heavy load the original PSU sounded seriously dangerous

For the rest as far as my experience as customer support is either you figure out what the error really is (currently imo impossible thanks to no logs etc. So more knowledge about the BIOS etc would be needed.)
or try it with the approach to check if this solution increases the overall stability of the system.

I know this is not a beautiful solution, but honestly i think it is the only way to work with issues like this where we have a lack of intel.

To rule out that the NVIDIA Drivers are an issue you can simply delete them and check if the systems lockups increase or decrease (of course only if the lockups are more or less reliable(i.E. daily) as in my case.)

If the system runs without lockups when NVIDIA isnt installed the driver sure have their influence on the issue If the machine still locks up then you could say the drivers are irrelevant for the issue.
Also since the driver seems to be for a Port not existing in my machine i am wondering why this is even there in the first place. The driver is for a USB-C Port on the GPU. Last card that had one was the 2080 Super for me

@ark628 

I'm not saying the Nvidia card is not involved. You don't even have to remove it. Just use the built-in HD750 video and you'll not lock-up. NO OTHER changes. I do recall you do have to disable the Nvidia in Dev. Mgr. though.

That Host Controller driver, is still in the PC (it is an MS file by the way) and might even be on XPS's without an Nvidia card (don't know, just guessing).

I think that is why the Lenovo thread on this continues to be active to this day, MS Windows Update might re-install or activate it?

For all I know, the last Windows Update might have had a file change (they, like the BIOS, had CVE's changes in some files) that caused me to lock up?

The driver as I understand it is more for a Monitor that will do daisy chaining (https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/how-to-daisy-chain-monitors) and will not come into play unless you do probably..

As for the Type-C driver, some people do not have it and have the lock-up, check here, https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-Desktops/XPS-8940-does-yours-freeze-randomly/td-p/8226583/page/4 so even without it it will lock up.

As I said, many have theories, and many claim that had it solved. No one KNOWS the cause.

Even your statement of the fans speeding up, others (except one other I think?) do not have this happening?

All I know is I had essentially one month of no lock ups and then 1 every day. No h/w or BIOS changes. Some MS files and probably others too in those days... how do you explain that, and with the Host Controller driver present as well?

If it works for you, fine, but it is not the 'fix', at least for everyone.

Hi all,

just to mention on this, I also get the fan spinning issue occasionally as part of the crash scenario. Not sure what happened the last 2 days, but suddenly had 3 crashes. Nothing installed other than latest win updates. Will dig into what they were.

If your issue goes away when using only the onboard intel gfx and disabling the nvidia, I think it’s the same issue. I don’t think we should be telling everyone it’s a different issue due to minor differences in the nature of the crash (mem dmp / fans / reboot etc).

So your Device Manager looks like this?

Thats weird why you dont have it installed at all... Maybe for me it was the case since i used a different monitor and setup previously that didnt involve daisy chaining but the Thunderbolt input of a dockingstation for a Lenovo WorkPC... Maybe thats why it was installed for me. I will try to recreate it when i have time.

With the part that we should aggree is that they might have a common root cause because it all startet after 2.4.0. The thing im thinking is that maybe they introduced some bug since this firmware (if i remember correctly the changelog was something about a security issue) and this bug can be caused by various things in the system since then that would explain why i.E. some lockups have the fan issue others havent and it would also explain the high variance in occurance of the issue for different people with similar setups.

Honestly one work around is => Start a GPU hefty application. It never crashed on me while a game was running that used the GPU.
And ive left it on during almost every night.

@inoodle It is important to distinguish the symptomps. The fans speeding up is indicating a different lockup imo and such details can be important. Youll notice the difference because the fans are really loud in this lockup.

I had both types of lockup but the one occuring very often was the lockup when the fans turned to maxrpm was occuring daily if not even twice at some days.

Not sure if it is solved because i hadnt had those lockups since i removed the NVIDIA Driver.
Altough i had one of the other lockups @ispalten had with no particular fan movement. If the driver is really for daisy chaining i can try that. It might reinstall when im not using HDMI as input for the GPU.
You also dont need to remove everything currently im just checking if this makes the system more stable. In my case this seems to work. I also checked other threads and others have tried sadly i couldnt get the info what type of lockup theyve had. Also most ive see had just disabled it and it seems they also had trouble with this thing reactivating itself. i havent experienced that yet.
Also i had yesterday a silent lockup. So even if those two lockup types have the same root cause the system stability for me seemed to increase since deinstallation of the NVIDIA eXtensive Host driver (do NOT delete the Intel eXtensive Host driver as this is needed for your USB ports)

Im not sure what exactly the Nvidia eXtensible Host driver is for but so far i couldnt make the system reinstall it by any means. Even a Driver Update from Geforce didnt reinstall it.

@ispalten im really thinking we are looking at two different issues with the machine. experiencing different symptoms. Might be that they are connected and that uninstalling is just a workaround to get rid of one of them but as said i hadnt had the system even close to be as stable as it currently is.

Next thing to tackle would be to remove the silent lockups which seem to appear everye 4+ days for me currently. Tbh i have little faith in dell fixing this. I am using dell machines for a long time and many of them had issues. Aw M11X R3 had heat issues like  the Alienware 13 had heatissues and even a faulty heatsink. The Graphics Amplifier had issues with the PSU. I think the only things not having issues is the Monitor and my first XPS Notebook. And even for the XPS i heard there are PSUs with 300 Watt and a similar equipment inside... I mean common 300 Watt is really low for a machine with such content.

honestly i dont see this as quality and im wondering how "normal" consumer market is reacting to issues like this. I mean everyone in the forum seems to have a lot of tech know how and noone could beat the issue. Honestly wondering what "normal" consumers would do. I think of backing up the data returning the machine. Or in case of those who have no warranty order a new PC not from Dell.

This would be at least my course of action. Maybe at some point if i cant figure out what causes the silent lockups i will dismantel the thing and use the components as spare.

Just to make it clear. Recently had lockups with noisy fans. Those were daily or even more often at some days. Those lockups have been gone since the deinstallation of the NVIDIA eXtensible Host.
The silent lockups still occure but since they are on a NOT daily level i didnt payed them much attention till now because the others were persistent.

Current Bios 2.9.0.

Disabled Nvidia eXtensible Host.

PSU has 500 Watt

C States are enabled

CPU Powermode is enabled

QuickBoot from Windows is disabled

Unfortunately my machine doesn’t have the nvidia usb bits, so no hope of a solution for me there (not sure why I don’t have them - I have a 3060ti).

just to clarify my previous point though - regardless of the slight differences in the crash, it seems logical to me that they have a common root cause IF the issue started around the time of bios 2.4 AND the issue is resolved when disabling the nvidia card. I’m not saying machines can’t crash for other reasons, just that it has to be a high probability that it’s related when we’re discussing intermittent crashes on similar spec machines.

I’m so tired of this issue - this is a trading machine for me and crashing while money is on the line is not fun.

@ark628, @inoodle,

Yes, there does appear to be 2 different distinguishable failures, and the cause in both are unknown. May or may not be the result of the same root cause. Until one knows/discovers the root cause, they are different.

@ark628 you have a different Device Manager output than I do, and that could account for something here? Here is mine (I did NOT remove any drivers at all):

I captured my Dev. Mgr. next to your output above to make it easy to compare. I also turned on show hidden devices. I marked those with a short red line and opened the properties on one to the right. All the light gray ones are NOT running/installed as the devices do not exist. Suspect this is a result of Dell having me jump through hoops re-installing Windows, replacing motherboards, etc. I have not worried about them at all though, and I think they have no bearing here.

I notice you have a Problem Device, the NVMe Firmware...

I've got one too but it is gray, and not connected to my computer???

We probably have 2 different SSD's I'm guessing, but it is not installed and a Dell file? I  have a WDC 500GB one.

I want to get back to Device Manager. You have NO USB 3.0 drivers other than the Root Hub? You also have Daemon Tools installed... These are differences, any of which could interact differently. Maybe removing the Daemon tools might even stop the fans from racing?

I know my fans can and do speed up. I've got 2 programs that cause them too. MS Flight Simulator 2020 and a Gamehouse Clutter's Greatest Hits... Increase the speeds as well as the temp of the devices, but nowhere near the high limits.

There is another program that might interest you, https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html#download as it shows what is actually connected to what for the USB controllers.

Note that the Type-C is not shown and neither are the 'grayed out' duplicates I have, more than likely as they are not loaded?

I know you have the German OS version, or at least it seems it is. On your Device Manager the Hidden Devices are enabled or you have the Pro version of Windows possibly.

So there could be many differences between all the users with problems.

I also know Dell produced (or the FAQ indicates it has) 8940's with 3 different 500w PSU's. A PSU that is not stable or can be noisy can also cause a problem like a lock-up.

These are the 3 PSU's they shipped with:

5K7J8 500w Delta
99TPH 500w Liteon
Y7R0X 500w Chicony

I can't find which I got from the initial order list of Dell parts I got, but I did open the case. PSU has Dell plastered all over it, but I discovered in small letters  on one of the lines on the lower right 'Liteon' so I'll assume that is the one I got.

I'm starting to wonder if all that have the problem have that same PSU. Others with one of the others DO NOT?

Seing your Device Manager your drivers are not partly but totally different.
The only driver i deinstalled was the NVIDIA eXtensible Host. The other NVIDIA stuff wasnt even there for me.

The thing with the firmware i have since i downgraded to 2.3.0.
Since its the NVMes Firmware i assume this is the M2 SSD i have.

The device cannot be started. (code 10)

{Invalid image}
%hs is either not designed to run on Windows or contains an error. Reinstall the program using the original installation media, or contact the system administrator or software vendor for assistance. Error status 0x

Deamontools i can uninstall but ive never got issues with it since 2012.
For the USB 3.0 it seems my front and rear ports are USB 3.0

For a temparature issue i can assure that this is none. Neither the silent lockup nor
the FAN Loud Lockup. I have monitored even a crash with my Thermal cam and we didnt even
got close to any real heat inside the system.
If it really should be a heat issue then its a needle pin point heat issue.

For the USB devices i made a screenshot:

For the device manager my OS is plain old german Windows 10 Home Edition.

For the PSU i got the 99TPH 500w Liteon i just checked it and have the 099TPH
manufateur is Liteon.

Honestly as my dad who builds pcs for 30+ years for fun said.
Most of the times it is the PSU when issues like this occure.
I just hesitate to order a new one as exchanging them is a bit of work and i dont want to throw money after this issue again like with the RAM.

@ark628 

For some reason, all the posts I've seen from German users with Dev. Mgr. has the SHOW HIDDEN active. US versions that is an option for viewing? Odd...

Anyway we've got different error code for it not working, you've got 10, I've got 45. "Currently, this hardware device is not connected to the computer. (Code 45)"

Going to the Event tab I see it was done on 7/6/2022 and by c_firmware.inf which I found in C:\windows\inf. It is purely an MS file from 2006?

Looking into my MS Update history I found this:

Now this matches the date... and on 7/5 MS Update DID update (back-level) my BIOS without me knowing it? So I suspect that 'device' is what is used to install the update silently by WU? I know that the 7/31 attempt did not happen and the file stayed in my Other Device driver until I deleted using a Troubleshooter. Suspect you'd find the same match between the Events on the driver properties and your WU Update history.

Interesting that we have same PSU?

I wonder is all those with the failure do? Could explain why some with Nvidia cards have no problem?

Yes, one can go crazy trying all the 'suggested fixes' for this. NONE seem to work.

I can't explain why we have different USB drivers? Could be the country language different causing this? Don't have translations for the US ones? Who knows...

Might depend on where you get the Nvidia drivers from. Dell has some as does Nvidia and other 3rd parties (see https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver ) for instance. Would they stop the fail (no, I've not tried it)? I use GEForceExperience to check for them and install it via the program. Leave it as the normal install. Might be different if you manually install it from Nvidia and change the options or even from Dell that might not include those drivers?

Hard to tell, but they are MS drivers, not Nvidia...

Little confused on your USB Tree, 3 different keyboard and mouse? Ports 6, 10, and 13? Moving the connector around and the Device Manager doesn't release the old one?

Bottom line here, even though we have the same XPS model, they do not compare.  Driver wise at least as well as non-Dell supplied stuff. Not to mention programs.

Do not forget, there are Nvidia users with no problems. No users on 8930's and 8950's with the problem either. Can rule out Windows in general too as at least one Linux (I think there are 2 here reporting lock ups) that has the problem. Also, different Nvidia Driver and they don't have the same USB drivers or the Type-C one... so that sort of blows up the Type-C 'fix' and even a USB problem as well as a Windows created one. What is left? Same BIOS, same Nvidia cards, same CPU, Drivers, and even Motherboards. PSU too, but is it only users with on specific one?

Just thought I'd add another data point:

My problem isn't as severe as others here, but equally annoying. I get dozens of background task lockups/day--mouse moves but only the active window works while everything in the background is frozen/unresponsive. Only way I've found to unlock is Ctrl+Alt+Del, then cancelling.

Suspecting corrupted system files, I did a clean install of W11 and after going nearly a day with no lockups I thought I was home free. Lo and behold, two more background lockups. Switched to onboard graphics and disabled the Nvidia driver...no difference.

This is the exact same behavior I had around November 2021 with an older Dell 8920 before went caput with a BSOD. Went through all the diagnostic procedures recommended here and elsewhere and it was determined to be a bad Mobo since all other hardware checked out. Unfortunately long out of warranty. Makes me wonder whether I've got ANOTHER bad one...