XPS 13 9360 DPC and CPU Throttling issues

Question

I've been using my XPS to DJ since Feb 2018 without any issues. Since the 28th of June I keep losing sound after 20-30 mins of Djing. I can no longer play for more than 30 mins without having to re-plug my DJ controller.

After speaking to Serato support and implementing all their , I downloaded LatencyMon.

Every time that I run LatencyMon after 2-3 mins it gives me the message:

"Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One or more DPC routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. One problem may be related to power management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates"

I've disabled everything related to Turbo Boost from the bios, but it still happens. I also followed the suggestion posted on Twitter by Nelson Mark but still no fix :smileysad:

Also tried to disable ACPI.sys from the device manager, as it's the driver that causes the highest delay, but it still seems to run.

To make things even worse for Dell, my Lenovo Yoga 2 13 from 2014 and the same version of Windows 10 runs fine. :Hmm:

Dell PM'ed me to say that they can't help (Even though I paid £1,5K for a professional machine) as my warranty has expired.

Anyone in the community that is a producer or DJ has the same issue and found a fix?

Thanks

Johnnythegeek · Answer

So I am not too familiar with this use but could it be a communication issue between the audio chip and CPU? Have you tried updating audio drivers? I doubt disabling turbo mode will do anything but throttle your CPU and make matters worse. Have you opened up Task Manager while your playing audio through the notebook? Do you see any excessive CPU cycles, or the audio thread using too much CPU processes? The only familiar connection I have is my wife's audio driver was going nuts after awhile using a lot of CPU percentage and I finally cleanly removed the driver and reinstalled it. I think it had to do with a driver update that did not properly update. It was like having two drivers for same hardware conflicting with each other.

CCR4 · Answer

Hello, I have the same usage with my XPS 13 8380 (2019), Production and deejaying. Last month i talked with Dell engineer to fix the same problem (Appeared out of the box) Dell release a new bios to fix DPC Latency, early july. For your problem, if it's recent (28th), it's possible your computer take an update or a driver update. Can you send me the full Latency Mon Report (Screenshot, Drivers view...)     Do you have any other software installed on it? Or is it a dedicated machine? Antivirus?

CharleeBangs · Answer

When I run a CPU benchmark using the Intel Extreme Tuning no throttling is happening. When I run a GPU benchmark, the CPU is throttling like mad. I have updated the drivers to the latest version but I might completely remove it and re install it

CCR4 · Answer

Can you try : - Open Intel HD graphic Control Panel - Go in Power - Disable Self Refresh + Power Saving Technologies   Or try with uninstall Intel Grahic. With VGA Basic card driver.

CharleeBangs · Answer

Completely uninstalled it but still the same message comes up from LAtencyMon and drop outs still happen :(

Johnnythegeek · Answer

I would at this point run the Intel CPU diagnostic tool to see if anything is wrong. Here is the link https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/topics/utility-tools.html  Maybe something has happened physically to your CPU to cause this throttling. Just a thought, I basically out of any other suggestions. Best of luck

CharleeBangs · Answer

@Johnnythegeek wrote:

I would at this point run the Intel CPU diagnostic tool to see if anything is wrong. Here is the link https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/topics/utility-tools.html Maybe something has happened physically to your CPU to cause this throttling. Just a thought, I basically out of any other suggestions. Best of luck

Thanks for the link Johhny, but the CPU and GPU passed all the tests. I guess that's good for the hardware lol

CharleeBangs · Answer

With the helpful support of @CCR4 I removed 3 Dell apps and Serato DJ seems to be working fine. I've done two DJ sets so far and I went for over 2 hours without any drop outs or audio glitches

mathieujm · Answer

Please tell us wich are the 3 applications you removed ?

CharleeBangs · Answer

This happened again after updated my system to W11. I removed the Dell Digital Delivery app and it seems to be working ok now according to LatencyMon. I will confirm after restarting

CharleeBangs · Answer

@CCR4 Do you have any recollection of what you told me in the private chat? I can't remember what I uninstalled an fixed this issue.

CCR4 · Answer

Hi, i think it was dell support assist. When you scan for drivers on dell website, the app is installed.

I think you can delete all the dell applications that are not necessary.

For information, I left dell and came back to Apple. I no longer wanted to use my brain to try and avoid audio problems... :)

CharleeBangs · Answer

@CCR4​ I don't blame you. It was working fine until I updated to W11 and now the DPC issues are back again. I've uninstalled all Dell software but still nothing.

XPS

XPS 13 9360 DPC and CPU Throttling issues

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