9500 randomly rebooting with ASF2 Force Off

I'm also having the exact same issue, with precisely the same symptoms. My XPS is still only 6 months old. I saw lots of other threads, where many others are also getting the same issue, and Dell isn't doing anything about it. Such a shame for a premium-grade laptop.

The only thing that worked for me so far, was disabling C-State in the bios (as mentioned in some other threads in the forum). Still too early to say whether it fixes the issue, but no reboots for the last two days.

Drawbacks: You'll lose the battery life. It won't stay more than a couple of hours on battery, even in sleep mode.

Hope that helps!

Hello, Since last thursday I've been getting random shutdowns on my Dell XPS 15 9570. I've used it for a year and 3 months without any problems until now.

After some debugging I've narrowed the problem down to the following:

- It only happens when connected to a charger (or charging via USB-C)

- It only happens when under sudden load

- Disabling turbo boost OR disabling speed step & shift keeps it stable

- It shows "ASF2 force off" error in BIOS logs

- Up/downgrading BIOS had no effect - Safe mode does not cause shutdowns Anyone have any idea what might cause this?

It's still usable, but I'd like to be able to use both turbo boost and speed step + shift.

lowes employee portal

I have been experiencing the same issue for a few months now. I was also running Arch Linux, began to get random reboots typically when interacting with UI elements, easily reproducible in Gnome by interacting with the UI shortly after boot. Once it rebooted, the charger would not work. You have to shut down, unplug, plug back in charger for it to charge again. BIOS reports ASF2 force off.

I reinstalled Arch multiple times, used different desktop environments (Gnome, KDE), X11, Wayland, still frequent crashes, to the point of it barely being usable.  Every time I re-setup Arch, I would run it in Hybrid graphics mode, IE: Nvidia Prime / Optimus graphics. I did notice however, crashing only really occurs when running the system in a Desktop environment, not in CLI mode.

To make sure this wasn't an issue specific to Arch, I installed Pop!_OS. Same issues exist when using their Hybrid mode, as does integrated graphics mode. HOWEVER, when I use the Nvidia only mode, I do not crash. At all. Of course, battery drain is worse in this mode. This is not a fix, but a workaround....

I also experience similar/same crashes in Windows with ASF2 in the BIOS, but it has only happened a handful of few times so far, nowhere near the frequency of Linux.

This however, leads me to believe that this issue is not isolated to Linux, it just occurs with more frequency/easier to reproduce (I have tried multiple M2s and have ran multiple RAM tests, all passed).

Because the issue occurs the most when the system is switching between graphics modes/displaying graphics, I think there is something wrong with the way the system handles the internal graphics and/or the handshake between integrated and external GPU... It is just a guess but all signs seem to point in that direction.

I got Inspiron 5501 with Nvidia mx330. Since 1.5 years after buying the laptop I discovered this issue, trying to play War Thunder. Previously I tried to play it on Windows, but the performance was really bad and I decided I just could not setup the driver properly (or launch the game on Nvidia instead of Intel). Anyway, I bought the laptop for work, so instantly forgot about gaming. Back in the days I tried that again and had poor performance and quality on Windows. Then I tried to run it on Ubuntu and to my surprise the performance was good (the rendered is Vulkan). But after a few minutes of running the game I always get the ASF2 error.

Turning off all available performance features in UEFI (c-states, shifts, boosts) gives no results.

Updating firmware either. I regret I had not proceed with that sooner so I could bring it to the authorized service office.