System Freezes Zenbook S13 OLED - AMD Display Driver Issue Fix (UM5302)

[r4microds]

Anyone having issues with random freezing on a fresh Windows Install for the Zenbook S13 OLED (UM5302TA)?
I had done a fresh install and grabbed the latest AMD drivers, and for about a week, at least once a day, I would get a random system freeze, forcing me hold down the power button and restart the device. If audio was playing in the background, or a discord call was going, I could still hear the other end speaking meaning the issue was purely on the display. I tried a DDU driver wipe, reinstalling chipset, etc... No luck.

After further research, I found that quite a handful of people were experiencing system hangs, black screens, etc.. On the latest AMD drivers. This sadly affects the Zenbook S13 OLED, 6800U (Zen3+, with RDNA2 680M iGPU). Eventually after being unable to solve it, I just did a cloud recovery from the UEFI to re-image the drive to ASUS Factory settings.

So the good news, a few days have passed, not a single system hang on the OEM drivers so I guess that means the hardware checks out, no issues. The bad news, OEM drivers are roughly half a year old / 6 months out of date and don't preform as well as the new ones for 3D applications like Blender or in games.. Generally, I'll take stability over performance so I guess im locked to the OEM 22.2.34 'Asus' driver.

Not sure what the odds are of Asus providing a tested stable display driver update for the machine. I would love for them to do so. AMD have been all over the place on display driver updates, and even their most recent driver causes the 6800u+680M iGPU to only have 512mb vram opposed to the 2GB stock Asus driver. During my research I did find that a common theme was that people on Windows 2H22 (current update), found that disabling "MPO" (Multiplane Overlay - a default windows display adapater fucntion) was stopping their freezes, etc.. This was on desktop AMD GPU's but could potentially also be the cause of the Zenbook S13 OLED Freezing too.

I'm curious if anyone with this Zenbook has tried this yet? Or found a fix to the freezing? I would try it myself but currently need the laptop to be stable for work. If anyone has, please write back. If not, I hope this at least helps anyone needing to fix their issue.

I should note, the option to do a Cloud Recovery from Asus only works if your machine is still under warrenty. The device is new on the market so at the time of writing, I imagine near everyone would still be. But for future users re-installing windows 11 the traditional way via flash drive, I can only hope the Asus support page's "OEM Display" drivers are still functional for you without freezing.

If for what ever reason they aren't, or the page is removed, this is an archive.org reupload of the "esupport" folder directly from a factory image of the UM5202 Zenbook S13 OLED. Ive used it to re-install the wifi adapter when I did a fresh windows install since it was not supported by default. I imagine the display adpater here is also the default one from the machine's factory image too since the Asus Cloud recovery runs these during its auto re-image of the device. Hope it helps someone in the future.
https://archive.org/details/eSupport

[r4microds]

I should mention this was also noted by another owner of the same device on this youtube video:
https://youtu.be/t9T4whyU7oI

My assumption is they also updated AMD video drivers

[rickyprose]

Dear @r4microds 

thanks for writing that and I have the same issue since I bought my Zenbook S13 UM5302TA.

Now I will disable the MPO and see what will happen.

I just follow this guide and I will update you soon: How To Disable MPO In Windows - ComputerSluggish

Rickyprose!

[r4microds]

Hey Rickyprose,

Sorry to hear you're dealing with the same issue. I wanted to update you and anyone reading this in the future that although these fixes seemed to resolve the issue for a time, a few days later, my Zenbook S13 OLED had a black screen for a second, then a message from the AMD adrenaline software saying Windows had updated the driver in the background and was no longer compatible. Not long after, freezing started to occur again. So in other words, eventually windows update would have the issue return given enough time.

I did however find what I believe to be a proper solution (I would hate to jinx it by writing about it) but I haven't yet had a freeze on my Zenbook in weeks. What I did was allow windows to update what ever it wanted, latest GPU+Chipset drivers from AMD. I then pulled the latest drivers from AMD's website themselves. Once all of that was up-to-date, I went into window's power profile settings and adjusted PCI Express link state power management settings to "off".



Doing so essentially stops windows from pushing less power to the GPU and the theory is that it helps with stability for devices using that lane. Weird that it would affect GPU since the R7 6800U is an APU with integrated graphics.. But regardless, I had read this post on a forum somewhere, tried it, and 'seemed' to have resolved the issue. Please give this one a shot if you're still dealing with it and with any luck it should no longer freeze randomly once a day.

All the best

[r4microds]

Ah I should mention, while updating the driver from AMD's website, I choose "Driver only" during the install and opted out of the Adrenline software suite to keep things as vanilla as possible. GPU software suites are used to essentially make edits to the graphics driver from factory parameters. I wanted the most sterile environment to attempt to resolve freezing.