Hello All,
I've been using an Alienware M18 R1 for ~1.5 years to play games and serve as a general home office PC. For the most part, the machine has worked well, allowing me to play a number of demanding titles without much issue (Hell Divers 2, a variety of Total War games, Squad, War of Rights, Kingdom Come Deliverance). However, I recently picked up an online coop game called DarkTide which crashed at a high frequency (basically every 20-30 minutes of gameplay). While I've had occasional crashes with other games, I've never seen anything of this severity. I did a bit of reading on the game and learned that other players have had instability and performance issues, though the issues seemed to be more relevant at early access. I experimented with my PC's settings and eventually figured out that if I used any sort of "performance" mode for my gaming sessions, the crashes occurred. However, those crashes went away by dialing back to "balanced" mode. The game modes are pre-defined PC settings set by a native app (Alienware Command Center); I believe the "performance" modes enact some sort of mild overclock. I've not had any issue using these performance modes for any game except for DarkTide. So I initially thought that the issue was due to poor game optimization and just resorted to playing the game in balanced mode, a solution which has worked thus far.
Having done a bit more reading on the 13th gen Intel CPU's, I've also seen that those CPU's had their fair share of issues. Supposedly, Intel released some BIOS firmware updates in August of last year. I'm thinking that the mild overclock was causing some sort of instability which triggered crashes for DarkTide.
My questions:
My Fulll setup:
I've been using an Alienware M18 R1 for ~1.5 years to play games and serve as a general home office PC. For the most part, the machine has worked well, allowing me to play a number of demanding titles without much issue (Hell Divers 2, a variety of Total War games, Squad, War of Rights, Kingdom Come Deliverance). However, I recently picked up an online coop game called DarkTide which crashed at a high frequency (basically every 20-30 minutes of gameplay). While I've had occasional crashes with other games, I've never seen anything of this severity. I did a bit of reading on the game and learned that other players have had instability and performance issues, though the issues seemed to be more relevant at early access. I experimented with my PC's settings and eventually figured out that if I used any sort of "performance" mode for my gaming sessions, the crashes occurred. However, those crashes went away by dialing back to "balanced" mode. The game modes are pre-defined PC settings set by a native app (Alienware Command Center); I believe the "performance" modes enact some sort of mild overclock. I've not had any issue using these performance modes for any game except for DarkTide. So I initially thought that the issue was due to poor game optimization and just resorted to playing the game in balanced mode, a solution which has worked thus far.
Having done a bit more reading on the 13th gen Intel CPU's, I've also seen that those CPU's had their fair share of issues. Supposedly, Intel released some BIOS firmware updates in August of last year. I'm thinking that the mild overclock was causing some sort of instability which triggered crashes for DarkTide.
My questions:
- Did Intel fully resolve the CPU issues with the BIOS update released in August of CY24?
- How do i confirm if i have the latest BIOS version? I confirmed that I have an Alienware motherboard with a BIOS version dated for November of CY24. I think I have the latest BIOS version, but I'm not sure.
- Are there any additional actions recommended beyond the BIOS update? Should I try finetuning my system using the Intel XTU app?
- Is there any risk with using performance modes (and the associated overclock) with other games? Again, this is a setting that came preset/configured with from the factory.
My Fulll setup:
- Windows 11 Pro
- 13th Gen i9-13900HX CPU
- 32GB RAM
- 1 TB SSD storage
- NVIDIA RTX 4080 GPU
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