what components do you have in this very powerful machine (CPU, graphics card, PSU, etc.)

liquid cooled CPU or air?

have you made any modifications to your rig?

what are the CPU and GPU temperatures when the performance drops?

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@Purbow wrote:

Aurora R12 with 64GB RAM.

crashes every day, and often struggles with Excel (simple worksheets), Word, etc.

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Does your Aurora-R12 pass ePSA Diagnostics ? (near BIOS on boot)

Is that 64gb RAM from Dell ? (Factory Installed). Have you done any other hardware upgrades?

What shows in Windows Reliability History report? See any (red) critical errors?

Hi Tesla1856, thank you for replying to my message.

I've made no modifications to the PC; it's as received from Dell. Further specs as follows:

- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X

- 11th Gen Intel Core i9 11900F (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.5GHz to 5.2GHz w/Thermal Velocity Boost).

- 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage)

- 64GB Dual Channel DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz

I don't know how to check ePSA Diagnostics or the Windows Reliability History report. If it's important then I can do this... 

Thanks,

Chris

Hi there - thank you for replying.

I've made no modifications to the PC; it's as received from Dell. Further specs as follows:

- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X

- 11th Gen Intel Core i9 11900F (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.5GHz to 5.2GHz w/Thermal Velocity Boost).

- 2TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD (Boot) + 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage)

- 64GB Dual Channel DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz

I don't know how to check temperatures, but power usage for the AWCC.Background.Server is 'Very high" when the machine slows/stops, according to task manager.

The PC is air cooled.

Thanks,

Chris

Air cooled is going to be an issue.

I would suggest using task manager and check CPU usage as it sounds to me like one or more processes are consuming a high amount of CPU cycles.

CPU usage 

yes . . . air cooled is going to be a big issue

check CPU & GPU temps in AWCC or 3rd party app like CPUID HWMonitor

you may be thermal throttling . . . even with a vanilla usage regime

what is your anti-virus program?

I have seen that Alienware.Background issue before and had my cpu constantly run at 4.9-5.0 GHz /Very High. The one way I figured out how to make my cpu go into idle was after start up and after a few minutes to let AWCC go through its thing usually around 3-5 mins. Open up AWCC then click on the FX tab, then the app will stop consuming resources, have your Task Manager open while doing this. I made a video I posted in here awhile back maybe search for Alienware.Background.Services.

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@mako64 wrote:

I have seen that Alienware.Background issue before and had my cpu constantly run at 4.9-5.0 GHz /Very High.

The one way I figured out how to make my cpu go into idle was after start up and after a few minutes to let AWCC go through its thing usually around 3-5 mins. Open up AWCC then click on the FX tab, then the app will stop consuming resources, have your Task Manager open while doing this. 

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Seriously?

Thanks for the tip, but pretty ridiculous to even have to do that.

While the older versions (like v4.8.x and earlier) seem to work pretty good:

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Aurora-R7-Command-Center-suddenly-not-working/m-p/8221083/highlight/true#M59823

... there seems to be some major issues with the v5.x versions. It's so bloated now.

IMO (for a while now) ... among the other poor feature choices ... Fusion was never a good idea in the first place. Additionally, if the objective is to turn Alienware Command Center into it's own OS GUI Layer, I'm not sure Dot-Net is the appropriate framework.

It's like maybe the Aliens don't actually use their own Alienware desktops (for daily activities, and their "world domination" gaming simulations).