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 The bad news, OEM drivers are roughly half a year old / 6 months out of date and don't preform as well as the new ones for 3D applications like Blender or in games..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
