Dell XPS 7590 / Traktor / dxgkrnl.sys / Wdf01000.sys / Latency and audio issues

Hello community,

I'm really hoping that someone is able to shed some light on this situation for me as it has been plaguing me months. I've got a Dell 7590 with plenty of RAM and processing power and it works great for all of the work that I do OTHER than DJ'ing which is something that I do part time and really enjoy. This laptop burned me on a gig back in February where the audio started to crack, pop, and even slow down so bad that I had to kill Traktor and re-launch it. Not cool. 

Fortunately I was also DJ'ing with a friend that night and his computer worked perfectly with my controller so I know that it's not my controller to blame. I also used the controller with my previous XPS 9560 laptop for years and never had an issue. 

I began to diagnose and troubleshoot. I tried different cables and USB ports and the problem persisted. I tried Traktor 2 and 3, same thing. I updated every inch of this computer, same thing. I uninstalled every piece of Dell software and even disabled the Dell Data Vault in the device manager, same thing. 

Recreating the problem was a bit of a challenge because it would only happen randomly while running Traktor. Sometimes I would DJ at home for hours and have no issues, other times it would happen right away, and sometimes 40 minutes into a session. The only way I could get the problem recreated quickly was by closing and opening the lid. 

Here's a video demonstrating.  https://youtu.be/NXguuwVm3uo

To be clear, I'm not opening and closing the lid like this when I'm DJ'ing...This was just to show you what the audio ends up sounding like. I never close the lid while DJ'ing because I'm terrified of this issue happening.

Seeing as I couldn't diagnose the problem I called Dell Support who were quick to blame Traktor however I was able to show that even windows media player would have cracks and pops in the audio playback if you opened and closed the lid even when you have the "what to do when the lid closes" setting set to "do nothing". I was pretty frustrated that a computer that is close to $3k was struggling with playing audio seamlessly while opening and closing the lid especially when my older computer did the job without issue.

Dell sent me a new SSD drive and motherboard and the problem persisted. In fact, I put the new SSD in, updated windows, installed traktor and still had the issue on a clean install. At this point, Dell said it was an issue with the intel UHD graphics driver as I was showing them latency monitor data that would have the DirectX Graphics Kernel driver spike in latency every time I opened the lid. Their fix was to have me on an older driver version which was temporary. There are two video cards in this laptop and I have tried disabling one or the other and I still can't get it to work properly, and frankly I shouldn't have to disable a video card or reinstall an older driver before starting a gig. There should be no cracks or pops (however small) when opening and closing the lid and Traktor being one of the most popular DJ platforms in the world is likely not to blame either. 

On the latency monitor the biggest culprits were: 

dxgkrnl.sys

Wdf01000.sys  

acpi.sys

So what else can I do at this point? Is this a documented issue that is in fact getting resolved with an update or was Dell trying to pin blame where they can?  I'm at the point where if I can't get this issue resolved I'm going to be forced to sell this computer because I earn money DJ'ing and need my tech to be tight.

Thanks so much for reading my post!