Random directx error crashes

[Demon_Giri]

Ah, yes, the Super Secret Menu, where my scroll wheel is backwards. Here's an album of various things that seemed relevant: https://imgur.com/a/rebeka139-bios-oCo2t0t

No sign of short duration power limit, long duration, or cpu current limit. Could be because I'm on a laptop and it has to account for AC and DC power? *shrugs* I found the same 56x/52x values that XTU showed, but they weren't editable in BIOS, or at least they wouldn't save. different numbers

I'm currently testing with Turbo Mode disabled. It was the only thing that jumped out at me as something that could cause minor stability issues to FFXIV with 2 Pcores being 56x and the other 6 being 52x.

Also, while writing this, I rechecked XTU advance view. The two watt settings here are referred to as "short duration" and "extended duration" power limit. Would that be the short and long we're looking for?


Edit: Initial results of Turbo mode disabled: CPU is hold temps around 65-70ºC while playing, used to be sporadic between 70 and 93. The cpu cooling fan has NEVER been so quiet while gaming, I can actually hear the gpu fan. Holding steady at 60 fps. gpu has climbed to 90% usage sometimes but mainly in the 60%'s, not sure if it did before, paid more attention to the cpu before this. cpu usage is only at 15% at most. Did the 7.2 dungeon and desert lvl 100 dungeon for roulettes, same as yesterday. 4 crashes total yesterday within that time, 0 today.

I know that's not comprehensive results when it comes to a random crash, but I'm liking them thus far.

I'd recommend keeping Turbo Mode enabled. That's what allows your processor to increase operating speed when it's given more demanding tasks. Without it, your CPU will only run at base speed at all times. It may remove your crashing, as your CPU will be running extremely-throttled, but it would be a very heavy-handed way to do it. At the very least, I would try looking in the BIOS again and seeing if those core ratios are still what you set them to/what they originally were. I would listen to what the BIOS says they are over what Intel XTU says they are. Intel XTU does change BIOS values, but can only read/write what the BIOS/MOBO allows it, so I'd defer to the BIOS first.

To answer a few questions:

In your imgur album, the third picture from the bottom, "Power Limit 1" and "Power Limit 2" are the short duration and long duration power limits. PL1 being the long duration. Also, yes, these correlate with "Turbo Boost Short Power Max" and the "Turbo Boost Power Max" settings in Intel XTU.

No relation to AC/DC power as far as available settings go. Yes, your laptop has an AC to DC adapter. The power supply in a desktop PC does the same thing. Assuming you don't have some kind of weird faulty power problem, nothing AC should ever be touching your PC or anyone else's. Pretty much all consumer-level electronics run on DC and have some kind of adapter either in the cable or built into the device itself. Available BIOS options will be largely based on what the particular motherboard manufacturer allows you.

Additionally, I have to apologize. I misread your processor model originally, so please ignore the original power limits and current limit I provided you. To avoid severely gimping your processor by turning turbo completely off, but still gain stability since the crashing does seem to be related to how the CPU is running, I'd suggest turning Turbo Mode back on, and then boot into Windows and set the following values in Intel XTU:

Turbo Boost Short Power Max: 157 W
Turbo Boost Power Max: 157 W

157W is the official "Maximum Turbo Power" wattage per Intel's official site for your processor.

We don't want the processor pulling more power than it should for turbo, sacrificing stability in the process, so lets try a little more conservative/official wattage for turbo, based on Intel's specs. We also don't necessarily want to run it LOWER than 157W for extended periods of turbo, so that's why we're setting both short and long duration turbo to the same value. It was already set to 220 on both before anyway.

I did grab a laptop of mine and was able to dig more into the MSI bios you have, myself, to get a little better idea of where things are and what they're named, but I think we might be able to do much of what we want from Intel XTU, which should write to the BIOS settings when you hit Apply anyway. You will just need to re-enable Turbo from in the BIOS.

So, just for clarification, I'd suggest:

- Boot into BIOS, re-enable turbo mode, check to see if P-Core Ratios are still what you set them to before/what they originally were. There should be two "blocks" of settings for those. One is labeled "current settings" at the top, the second "block" of values is where you would adjust them, I believe.
- Boot into Windows, Open Intel XTU, Set:
Turbo Boost Short Power Max: 157W
Turbo Boost Power Max: 157W
- Hit Apply in Intel XTU
- Reboot into BIOS, check the Power & Performance>CPU - Power Management Control>Configure Turbo Options menu to see if PL 1 and PL 2 match the 157W you just set in Intel XTU, just to make sure they took
- Reboot into Windows and try your game for a while. Monitor temps if you'd like

Hope that helps clear some things up. Let me know if you run into a snag in that process,
Giri

[rebeka139]

You don't have to apologize, if it weren't for you I probably wouldn't have found the turbo mode on/off switch for another month or two. The fact that there's an actual chance of a light at the end of the tunnel is such a relief.

I did turn off Turbo mode mainly as a heavy handed find the source of the problem type move. It worked, but now I get ~45fps in populated areas and frontline. Still running way colder though, was peaceful without the fans going brrrrrrrr 100% of the time. Turning turbo back on and changing the voltage in XTU was going to be my next test if I didn't hear back, so good to see I was heading the right direction.

If you don't hear from me for a bit, no news is good news. I'll definitely update here and the reddit post with results, especially if sharing this info helps even one other person with this issue.

Edit: welp, immediate results of still crashing the game. Same call stacks. Tried lowering the wattage to 150 in XTU and logging back into the Frontline I was in. Game crashed a second time, so two crashes within a 15 min match. Temps were still roughly what they were from before today's testing, peaking around 93C and fans going full blast even when not near large groups. I know undervolting too much can cause damage if it goes too low, but is there a good place to start with limiting the wattage further?

[Demon_Giri]

You don't have to apologize, if it weren't for you I probably wouldn't have found the turbo mode on/off switch for another month or two. The fact that there's an actual chance of a light at the end of the tunnel is such a relief.

I did turn off Turbo mode mainly as a heavy handed find the source of the problem type move. It worked, but now I get ~45fps in populated areas and frontline. Still running way colder though, was peaceful without the fans going brrrrrrrr 100% of the time. Turning turbo back on and changing the voltage in XTU was going to be my next test if I didn't hear back, so good to see I was heading the right direction.

If you don't hear from me for a bit, no news is good news. I'll definitely update here and the reddit post with results, especially if sharing this info helps even one other person with this issue.

Edit: welp, immediate results of still crashing the game. Same call stacks. Tried lowering the wattage to 150 in XTU and logging back into the Frontline I was in. Game crashed a second time, so two crashes within a 15 min match. Temps were still roughly what they were from before today's testing, peaking around 93C and fans going full blast even when not near large groups. I know undervolting too much can cause damage if it goes too low, but is there a good place to start with limiting the wattage further?

Don't confuse turbo power limiting with undervolting here.

Turbo power limits just say that when the cpu goes into turbo, it can't draw more than a certain wattage

Undervolting actually reduces how much power you're giving the cpu at all times

When UNDERVOLTING, you'd want to make extremely small adjustments (in volts), but the wattage change you made on the power limit honestly isn't huge.

Intel's official specs for your processor are:
Processor base power: 55w
Maximum turbo power: 157w

With the i7-14700k as an example, people usually recommend power limiting that one for exactly what Intel's specs on it are, which is 125w and 253w respectively, so let's just try setting yours the same way.

This would be 157w (or you can leave this at 150 if you want) for your short duration, and 55w for the long duration.

55w is the wattage for base frequency, so this will probably keep it from running at turbo speeds over long periods of time. If your performance is noticeably worse with this but you're not crashing anymore, you might be able to play with slowly raising it back up little by little until you find a sweet spot.

[rebeka139]

Don't confuse turbo power limiting with undervolting here.

Turbo power limits just say that when the cpu goes into turbo, it can't draw more than a certain wattage

Undervolting actually reduces how much power you're giving the cpu at all times

When UNDERVOLTING, you'd want to make extremely small adjustments (in volts), but the wattage change you made on the power limit honestly isn't huge.

Intel's official specs for your processor are:
Processor base power: 55w
Maximum turbo power: 157w

With the i7-14700k as an example, people usually recommend power limiting that one for exactly what Intel's specs on it are, which is 125w and 253w respectively, so let's just try setting yours the same way.

This would be 157w (or you can leave this at 150 if you want) for your short duration, and 55w for the long duration.

55w is the wattage for base frequency, so this will probably keep it from running at turbo speeds over long periods of time. If your performance is noticeably worse with this but you're not crashing anymore, you might be able to play with slowly raising it back up little by little until you find a sweet spot.

Learning a lot here, so thank you for bearing with me.

Ok, so basically long/extended duration is a reference point of what power it likes to be at average (set between 55-157W for my processor) but it can go above that point. Short duration power is a cap on what power it can go up to for short bursts (157W max for me). The 56s setting is duration over which the power needs to average at the long duration reference point, and so it'll de-turbo if it starts averaging above. Just like to know what I'm messing with here.

And some good news, I found the overclock on/off switch (power & performance > CPU Managemant > Configure CPU Lock Options (at the bottom) > Disable Overclock lock), so I can finally edit those 52x/56x on the Pcores. Only seem to be able to edit them in the BIOS and not XTU, but that's fine, I know my way through that maze now.

If I'm understanding those, 52x means 52 times the clock speed (100 or 102.4MHz I'm guessing?) for ~5200MHz.

For my current test, I set short and long to 157W again and all Pcores to 52x instead of two at 56x and 6 at 52x like it's been all this time. Afterburner was showing 5242 and 5141 as the top two speeds. Temps are up in the 80C's but I didn't see any peaks in the 90C's. No crash yet after 7.1 dungeon and a frontline. It's entirely possible ffxiv just doesn't like mix-matched core speeds, and why the crash seemingly happened more often in graphically modern or crowded areas, but could still happen anywhere if the right processes hit that core speed discrepancy.

The one question I have about the Pcores at the moment, and just using arbitrary numbers here. Which is better for the CPU's long term health:
>52x/5200MHz and 8-11% usage (current)
>45x/4500MHz and 15-20% usage (rough estimates here)

[Demon_Giri]

Learning a lot here, so thank you for bearing with me.

Ok, so basically long/extended duration is a reference point of what power it likes to be at average (set between 55-157W for my processor) but it can go above that point. Short duration power is a cap on what power it can go up to for short bursts (157W max for me). The 56s setting is duration over which the power needs to average at the long duration reference point, and so it'll de-turbo if it starts averaging above. Just like to know what I'm messing with here.

And some good news, I found the overclock on/off switch (power & performance > CPU Managemant > Configure CPU Lock Options (at the bottom) > Disable Overclock lock), so I can finally edit those 52x/56x on the Pcores. Only seem to be able to edit them in the BIOS and not XTU, but that's fine, I know my way through that maze now.

If I'm understanding those, 52x means 52 times the clock speed (100 or 102.4MHz I'm guessing?) for ~5200MHz.

For my current test, I set short and long to 157W again and all Pcores to 52x instead of two at 56x and 6 at 52x like it's been all this time. Afterburner was showing 5242 and 5141 as the top two speeds. Temps are up in the 80C's but I didn't see any peaks in the 90C's. No crash yet after 7.1 dungeon and a frontline. It's entirely possible ffxiv just doesn't like mix-matched core speeds, and why the crash seemingly happened more often in graphically modern or crowded areas, but could still happen anywhere if the right processes hit that core speed discrepancy.

The one question I have about the Pcores at the moment, and just using arbitrary numbers here. Which is better for the CPU's long term health:
>52x/5200MHz and 8-11% usage (current)
>45x/4500MHz and 15-20% usage (rough estimates here)

I shit you not, I was in the process of writing an additional reply that suggested putting your power limits both back to 157 if that didn't work, and moving forward with turbo ratio adjustment.

Your first question: The turbo power LIMITS are just that. They are limits, in wattage, of how much power the CPU can try to pull to try to achieve its turbo goals (this would be the turbo ratios). The 56 seconds setting is the definition of what it will consider "short" duration, to make the distinction between how much power it's allowed and for how long. For instance, you could say you want the CPU to be able to pull 200W but only for 10s, at which point it's only allowed 100W for turbo duties from that point onward, until it comes back out of turbo and makes a new request. This could look something like 200w for 10s and then 100w for 5 minutes. Just an example. Instituting these limits doesn't inherently tell your processor it can't try to run that fast, it just gives it less fuel when it tries. These can reduce temperatures (indirectly) and power bill.

I'm glad you found the OC lock. I had also found that in my laptop's BIOS between writings, and was doing my own testing to see toggling that would let me into more settings in XTU, but I don't have the same computer or processor as you, so my results vary from yours in that regard.

Your second question: The turbo ratios are directly correlated to the frequency that the CPU tries to run at when turbo, so reducing those ratios will directly reduce the ceiling of speed at which your processor can run. This would also, more directly and drastically, result in lower temperatures and lower power draw. You're literally telling it to run slower (when turbo).

I don't necessarily suspect the core speeds being different from eachother being the problem, but it's possible. I was going to suggest dropping each of them by about 5 respectively, which would have left them different from eachother, but a reduction across the board. I was also going to suggest the same thing on your E-Core ratios, but if you find that the change you already made stays solid, then I'd leave it. No reason to reduce it further if not for stability, unless you're just really wanting lower thermals for your laptop experience. This obviously costs you overall performance. If you ever want to confirm your ratio settings took without having to book back into BIOS, you can use HWINFO64 to see them individually.

When you open it, it'll pop up a system summary window. Close that, then in the main window you should see a list of dropdowns on the left side. open the Central Processor(s) dropdown and click on the name of your CPU. In the right-hand pane that opens, you can scroll down to the "Operating Points" section and see the "Turbo Ratio Limits (P-Cores)" entry and "Turbo Ratio Limits (E-Cores)" entry. It'll show something like 56x(1-2c), 52x(3-4c), etc. The x part being the multiplier, and the 1-2c part being which cores it applies to. Not necessary, just a tool you can use if it adds any convenience to you.

In response to your long term health question, I don't want to speak beyond my personal knowledge here, but with my current understand, I THINK:

The actual CPU usage is just a metric of how saturated or at-capacity the CPU is by its current task load. This doesn't have much bearing on life. The main factors that have influence on overall CPU lifespan are HEAT and power. Having good cooling is one of the best ways to elongate CPU life, as well as running it with an appropriate amount of power. Both of those reasons are why overclocking generally reduces life, as overclocking is usually giving it more power and pushing it harder to get more performance out of it, at the cost of higher thermals and higher power draw.

So, in your case, the 4500MHz turbo would hypothetically keep it cooler and drawing less power, which hypothetically would have a longer lifespan than the 5200MHz. It would also be slightly less performant. However, I wouldn't say you're likely to have a noticeable difference in lifespan in this case.

You may be able to drop it down to 4500MHz and not see much change in FFXIV, as your GPU is doing most of the work there, but you might find a bit less performance in CPU-centric tasks. Just FYI.

Hope that helps,
Giri