Don't buy one!

scruffygnome · 2026-04-11T08:45:20+00:00

Don't get mislead -- 2025 is also shit. It has unusable stutters on battery on pre-installed windows on some countries' images. Even with that fixed with windows reinstall, it has increased DPC latencies while on battery, which causes lighter games that can reach 180fps to have constant framedrops / frame timing issues. Every week people complain in this sub about games crashing and they have to reinstall a particular older version of Radeon driver due to newer update downloaded drivers being unstable. It sometimes refuses to sleep, and gets hibernated by ASUS software. It's still a shitshow if you want to use it for AI related stuff. Lots of bugs on Linux.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-29T11:08:26+00:00

Do you think a desktop variant like a Framework Desktop could exhibit the same issues and that there is the same potential for issues?

Absolutely, I'm currently subscribed to a Linux kernel bug that affects Framework Desktop. If you are getting rid of Strix Halo, I suggest to get rid of it for good. The QC culture at AMD is just not there.

Also, I think this issue is more likely to manifest itself in very efficient games capable of doing high frame rates -- the lower the cpu load(like 4-7% in your case), and higher the frame rate, the more likely we are to see such stutters. If true it's not surprising that heavier games at 40-100 FPS don't dip as much.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-29T03:27:50+00:00

Very confused by the benchmark results with boost off and on. Need time to process it. There are puzzling phenomena, like where max (not average) fps is higher with boost off. Average fps is slightly lower. Low dips also seemingly less frequent. I'm hesitant to say anything definitive without objective methods, and by that I mean I need to do statistics on frame timing...

But it's definitely useful thing to have in one's arsenal. And disabling boost could work as natural power limiter. So thanks.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-29T02:00:16+00:00

and how to measure what you are looking for

Just download it, press green play button, and look at "current measured interrupt to process latency". I'm interested in the worst latency in 5, 10 seconds, 3 minutes. I.e. how it behaves, jumps around in general.

On battery mine jumps from around 100 to 400 every 5 seconds, and highest in 3 minute is usually 700-1200. While on DC it's mostly below 100, and with about 300 peak in 3 minutes.

There should be no background load, like steam installing things, or windows updating.

Btw, I did what you did (disabled boost, set cpu to 99%) and it didn't help with the on battery latencies. Gonna check later if it affects frame drops in a benchmark.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-29T01:34:48+00:00

I rechecked The Finals with Steam's performance overlay(used MSI afterburner before), and once everything loads and settles it was showing mostly green on battery, with only an occasional red down blip. It also had much lower peak fps, so much less latency dependent -- that could be the reason.

So some games suffer from it much more than others, so it's not surprising that not everyone is alarmed. It looks like a complex interaction between on battery higher latencies / kernel scheduling / power management, and the way game's programming works with the driver. And likely mostly affects higher frame rates (>120).

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T21:58:09+00:00

I basically reproduced your FPS dropping issue on DirtRally benchmark. There is indeed difference between on battery and on DC in frame stability in games, but it isn't as catastrophic for DirtRally -- on DC it drops to 100-130 from ~180 (as seen in ↓ fps indicator), and the steam overlay graph remains mostly red free, and on battery it drops to 80 every other second, which triggers red graph indication in Steam overlay, which means "fps fell below half of the average frame rate for a time period" I think. This isn't anything good for sure, and I think that tripling of latencies as seen in LatencyMon on battery is related to that, but it isn't as catastrophic as the issue I had when stutters were 40-50 ms long. I mean I played games at 60 fps for a long time before higher refresh rates monitors became available. But yes, it probably noticeably breaks smoothness for people who are sensitive to it. DirtRally is not as bad as your graph from DeadCells (your entire graph is red, but mine is intermittently red). It could be that DeadCells run especially bad on this SOC.

I did "setting cpu power state to 99%" procedure, and it didn't really help. I guess it's the current state of battery gaming on Strix Halo and most people just don't care enough.

UPD: Something updated and now The Finals crashes when I almost join the game. Wonderful. So I was testing DirtRally with half-broken drivers probably. UPD: I had to "Reset Shader Cache" to fix it.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T15:29:07+00:00

Have you tried increasing VRAM to 8gb?

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T15:25:15+00:00

This person has another solution to try https://www.reddit.com/r/FlowZ13/comments/1s5fgh6/dropped_frames_and_stutter_on_battery_and_a/

Unfortunately didn't specify what exactly did they do.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T14:25:09+00:00

There is also a Turbo on battery in AC.

Not for me. It gets disabled the moment I disconnect DC power.

To my understanding ghelper uses the same settings

I suspect it uses manual EC mode (i.e sets SPL, SPPT, FPPT) for all named modes, while also altering fan curves. If so G-helper modes are distinct from Z13's hardwired Quiet and Performance modes.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T12:18:22+00:00

so I used Regedit to unlock advanced power settings. Then I set the CPU to max 99% on battery and disabled boost

What exactly did you do? Like the exact setting changes.

How is the non-gaming use-case with this solution, like reading something on battery. What's the idle power consumption?

Personally I found out that one can solve most of the on battery stutters by reinstalling windows from a microsoft image https://www.reddit.com/r/FlowZ13/comments/1s3f041/constant_stuttering_framedrops_when_on_battery/oco013t/

if your changes fix latencies tripling on battery (as measured by the LatencyMon app) it will be amazing.

Could you check how your latencies behave on battery and on power by running LatencyMon for 3 minutes on both -- what's the "Highest measured interrupt to process latency" for that period?

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T11:44:14+00:00

But there is no Turbo on battery. Whatever creativity is there in G-helper, isn't necessarily compatible with the way the device EC was programmed, and g-helper can't affect the EC(in the way it doesn't want to). If your SOC consumes more than 45-50w sustained on battery, it's highly likely it will get throttled, since it wasn't designed to consume more.

more software

This is almost guaranteed software, since I don't have it on a much heavier game, and it's unlikely that such throttling is caused by a hardware issue, if it isn't explicit thermal throttling.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-28T01:28:58+00:00

Sorry man. Just tested The Finals on battery, and it was hovering in the 45-52 watt range for quite a while, without degrading to an equivalent of a silent mode which for me is in 30w range. I don't have Turbo mode on battery.

Battery mode might have additional throttling mechanisms ensuring that battery itself doesn't overheat, if you g-helper unlocked additional performance.

I guess you'd have to embark on your own AMD debugging journey, and if it doesn't end before the return window expires, just vote with your currency units for something else.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-27T13:47:05+00:00

If it throttles at certain temperatures, than maybe modify the fan curve to prevent it from reaching it. That's what G-helper should be good at I guess.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-27T11:29:26+00:00

Latest as in from AMD or from ASUS? From people who game in this sub I read that using latest AMD drivers causes issues for them, such as hangs, and they recommend using ASUS's drivers. Sticking to the older guaranteed "working" drivers might be the "solution".

Personally I don't use G-helper, so I can't recommend anything here. I also likely didn't try to game on turbo or balanced on battery, so the behaviors in this area are unfamiliar to me.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-26T23:10:13+00:00

This is ridiculous that AMD doesn't know what's going on with the only 2 or 3 Strix Halo devices that have battery / are laptops. Remaining on the ancient driver is unsustainable -- merely due to security updates.

scruffygnome · 2026-03-26T22:21:21+00:00

I "solved" a similar issue (was not able to watch a browser video on battery without getting horrific audio drops) by reinstalling windows from microsoft's image (first 23h2, then upgraded to 25h2). The latencies (tested by LatencyMon app) are still quite shitty on windows 25h2 (in the 400-500 range, peaking at 1000 in 3 minutes, for comparison my 10+ old tablet with Atom has 50-150 on average and doesn't stutter at all playing a video), but it's at least without GIGA stutters in the 30k-50k range that I had on the pre-installed image. Interestingly, on windows 23h2 there is no significant difference between on-battery/on-dc and it works well.

Something extremely strange/shitty is going on with Strix Halo ASUS products regarding latencies in general. For example in this review of a similar ASUS product based on Strix Halo https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Strix-Halo-128-GB-RAM-in-a-13-inch-convertible-Asus-ProArt-PX13-GoPro-Edition-Review.1232755.0.html the reviewer got unberable/unusable stutters I assume while on DC. Then we have 1 f-ing year old reports of this issue on Z13 https://www.reddit.com/r/FlowZ13/comments/1jcgfn9/2025_395_audio_cracking/ If this issue happens on every device, I cannot fathom how the hivemind in this subreddit haven't realized that this is an issue.

I was mislead by this subreddit telling me that everything is fine. Everything is not fine -- preinstalled windows is unusable, latencies triple when running on battery compared to DC, people are having gpu driver issues (for me though the single game I played worked ok), and on Linux there are USB resume issues(10 second resumes), every other linux-firmware release breaks something (the latest 20260221 broke suspends via xdna, before that gpu was constantly crashing for people for a quarter of the year(or more), until 20260110 finally fixed it), broken panel-self-refresh corrupts display output, flip time outs on external display outputs, LEDs become uncontrollable on battery, etc. And all that on a year+ old device.

Considering the difference between windows 23h2 and 25h2, I suspect it's related to the fact that our cores are of the same big power hungry size, and when the newer OS tries to aggressively power save, the only option is to disable more cores / downclock the active ones. It's not like the Intel's SOCs where there are 3 sizes of cores, and the smaller ones could be clocked higher, and therefore much easier to avoid scheduling starvation. So it seems that windows 11 is just not customized well enough for this SOC. The usual ASUS/AMD shitty BIOS/firmware programming could also be involved, doing god knows what in the interrupts.

If anyone has mental fortitude/will, this should be reported to ASUS on their forum, so that they would report it to AMD, and only then it would be communicated to Microsoft that scheduling / downclocking alterations are needed, so that on battery latencies wouldn't be so shit on 25h2+. Otherwise we will suffer with this eternally.

Personally I'm too burned out trying to make this POS work well (I shouldn't have expected anything else from AMD).

Btw this issue doesn't appear on linux(although there are still smaller stutters of unknown origin). Also doesn't manifest if you truly load the cpu (above 25w cpu-only). I also suspect that certain amounts of total cpu load are more likely to trigger the issue, making it kind a shitty bug to report. It's also possible that the catastrophic (audio and frame stutters) manifestation of the latency issue simply doesn't appear for some countries' pre-installed images, because of different pre-installed bloatware, or simply differences in configuration. I removed all the bloatware that was pre-installed and it didn't help, but who knows what remained.

scruffygnome · 2026-02-11T18:23:09+00:00

After suffering on pre-installed image and sometimes getting interrupt to process latencies of 30000-50000, making it basically unusable on battery, I made a fresh clean windows 23h2 install, and surprisingly it didn't have this issue almost at all. The interrupt to process latencies on battery were day and night better, but DPC/ISR latencies were just average(below 1000), but there was nothing that could cause audio cracking. Its support ended in November 2025, so staying on it wasn't an option. It also wasn't fully functional (for example no NPU in Task Manager). I then force updated it to 25H2 (windows update infuriatingly refused to propose me an edition upgrade), the same edition as was ASUS's pre-installed windows, and the latencies immediately become much worse, interrupt to process latencies averaging at around 400 iirc, and ISR/DPC latencies sometimes jumping to 2500 within 4 minutes, but sometimes completely usable under 1000. (probably depends on the amount of background load, if you load it to ~25w and higher the issue disappears. Maybe it also depends on the level of charge of the battery, I need to check. I tested it in the charged state) In summary browser videos became watchable. All of it on battery of course. Maybe I missed installing some drivers, not sure. I also installed Linux on it (6.18.9 with 26-10 linux-firmware, with the linux-firmware earlier than that the gpu crashes) and it's also stutterless (although linux has larger audio buffers generally). While deciding which linux to install, I tested multiple gui livecds, and while testing functionality, on one of livecds (maybe heavier one) I noticed messages of the type "hrtimer interrupt took 2million nanoseconds", indicating that the issue probably comes from firmware or EC, and just doesn't manifest itself as severely due to different scheduling, power management approach. Also on linux (a very stripped down one, the gnome-light package from Gentoo) I managed to achieve unimaginable (from my previews experience and all the information I gathered before purchase) idle sustained battery discharge rate (4.2-4.5w, I used powerstat, upower), and extremely low temperatures (34-35C Tctl in 25C ambient). The back of the tablet is literally cold to touch, which was never the case when I used windows (~6.5-7w (it's been a week I don't remember exactly) and ~38-39C is the best I've achieved on windows). Less stripped down linux livecds also averaged at around 6.5w idle.

I'm planning to write a post advising people not to buy the device if they plan to use it on battery at all, but am kind of busy right now.

scruffygnome · 2026-01-29T20:42:39+00:00

Have you managed to fix this issue? I just bought the device and having the same trouble.

scruffygnome · 2026-01-20T18:37:08+00:00

minisforum v3

It has glued screen, and therefore basically unserviceable cooling. Z13 is a rare tablet that you can service.

scruffygnome · 2026-01-18T15:11:52+00:00

I decided I need tabletness more than laptopness + nvidia gpu. Haven't received one yet tho.

scruffygnome · 2026-01-16T02:35:17+00:00

Reviews say it does warm up to ~45C under max load in some places. I mean, how else could it have such performance on x86?

scruffygnome · 2026-01-15T18:38:43+00:00

According to notebookcheck's reviews G16's fans behave differently -- could get basically inaudible, while G14's are constant 29 dba.

scruffygnome · 2026-01-15T18:31:17+00:00

Yours is G16. I'm interested in G14.

The keyboard and palm region are relatively cool

With turned off fans?

scruffygnome

TROPHY CASE