Dell Pro Max 16/18 Plus (2025 model) pre-release discussion — MB16250, MB18250

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, OneSunOne said:

1- The machine freezes for a split second every few minutes. When audio is playing at the same time, it also makes a buzzing noise through the speakers when it freezes/stutters for the split second. 

2- When pushing the machine hard (doing rendering work), it freezes/stutters more often, to the point that it sounds like a popping/crackling noise coming from the speakers. 

 

Run LatencyMon. Go to the Drivers tab. Sort it by "highest execution". After you experience one of these stutters, see which one is at the top of the list. (All drivers should finish their work in less than 1ms, so ideally you wouldn't see anything over 1ms. However, anything over a low single digit milliseconds is especially bad and can lead to audio and system stutters.)

 

Does anyone have one of these systems who is not experiencing problems with it? This sounds even worse than what I was experiencing with the Precision 7770. (Combined issues from Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Microsoft on that system is what forced me to rethink what ecosystem I am even using...)

[MyPC8MyBrain]

45 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Does anyone have one of these systems who is not experiencing problems with it? This sounds even worse than what I was experiencing with the Precision 7770

both 7770 and the later 7780 were before they decided in all their wisdom to stack both dGpu and CPU on top of each other for the perfect "easy bake oven" effect.

[OneSunOne]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Run LatencyMon. Go to the Drivers tab. Sort it by "highest execution". After you experience one of these stutters, see which one is at the top of the list. (All drivers should finish their work in less than 1ms, so ideally you wouldn't see anything over 1ms. However, anything over a low single digit milliseconds is especially bad and can lead to audio and system stutters.)

 

Does anyone have one of these systems who is not experiencing problems with it? This sounds even worse than what I was experiencing with the Precision 7770. (Combined issues from Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Microsoft on that system is what forced me to rethink what ecosystem I am even using...)

 

Thank you very much for the advice. I ran LatencyMon, can you make sense of the attached results?

 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

@OneSunOne
If your BIOS is set to RAID (Dell's default on many models), it ramps up storport.sys latency. Switching to AHCI mode often drops this dramatically and boosts consistency in I/O-heavy benchmarks. After that, uninstall Intel RST drivers and let Windows use its native NVMe ones.

to do this change you must follow these steps to the T,
if you missed F2 reboot and try again until you get it right
(do not change this bios setting in any other order or you risk bricking your windows boot!)

from windows admin command prompt issue perform the following in this order

Enable Safe Mod:
bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal
shutdown /r /t 0
 

reboot, enter BIOS (Press F2 during post)
Change SATA / Storage mode from RAID / RST → AHCI
Save and exit BIOS

 

Windows will now continue to boot into Safe Mode, once in Safe mode,
from windows admin command prompt issue this command to Disable Safe Mode and boot back to Windows:
bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot
shutdown /r /t 0

Windows will now boot cleanly in AHCI mode,
if you still have the same issue afterwards report back.
 

[Aaron44126]

The biggest offender on there by far is ACPI.sys. That value 43ms is way too high. (I care about "highest execution" more than "total execution". This is saying that there was at least one time where ACPI.sys grabbed control of your system for a full 43ms straight. A high number in "total execution" is fine — a driver can do a lot of work as long as it is returning control quickly.)

 

ACPI is power management. Unfortunately, even having a starting point like this, it can be difficult to figure out "what to do about it".

 

Question, though. Does your system have an NVIDIA GPU? Can you go without it for a while (assuming graphics switching is turned on)? Try disabling the NVIDIA GPU in Device Manager and see if you still run into the stuttering behavior.
 

@MyPC8MyBrain is right, disabling RAID in BIOS can help if you don't actually need it. But I don't think that's going to be the main problem here.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

3 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

even having a starting point like this, it can be difficult to figure out "what to do about it".

absolutely agree!
this is the main reason i didn't suggest more steps atm and was carefully building up to it from the logical starting point. 
(i did notice both the ACPI issue and NVIDIA potential)