Main problem
I have 2 external monitors and I always have my laptop's monitor turned off.
Sometimes when I shutdown and boot the laptop, the Core X and eGPU is instantly recognized, and the Windows login screen appears on the 1st external monitor as expected. Once I login, everything works well and fast as expected.
But sometimes when I shutdown and start the computer, the 2 external monitors are not recognized and the Windows login screen appears on the laptop's screen. When I login, after about 30 seconds the laptop monitor switches off and the 2 monitors start working. Unfortunately, when this happens the laptop works very slow. There are lags in moving windows and even keystrokes are slightly delayed. Sometimes it will just continuously turn on and off the screens about 6 times, then AMD it will say crashed.
To recover from the "bad boot", I shut down everything again, turn off the Core X for 30 seconds, start it up and try booting again. 75% of the time it boots correctly the 2nd time. If after a few tries it still keeps booting weirdly, then the only thing that works is reinstalling Razer Synapse and the AMD drivers.
Things I have tried
I am a software developer, so I have skewered the Event Viewer and many other forums to no avail. I have tried every combination of drivers:
- Let Windows install the correct drivers
- Install everything on my own
- Install AMD's stable and experimental drivers
Things I have noticed
Two peculiar things I noticed:
- After a bad boot, only a clean shutdown and boot up may work. A restart has never worked. It seems like Core X needs that extra few seconds of no connection.
- After a Windows Update the chance of having a bad boot are very high. In fact, over the course of the last few updates that only things that saved me was completely reinstalling the drivers.
My suspicions
There are 4 points of potential failure:
- Dell's USB-C drivers have issues: Unlikely because it has happened on 2 other XPSs and 1 ThinkPad
- Core X Chroma hardware issues: Unlikely because I tried out the Core X and the Core Chroma, but have shown this problem.
- Windows issues: a good possibility but I don't see why since the latest laptop I got was 2 weeks ago and it was completley fresh.
- AMD driver issues: also a possibility
For some reason I have a feeling that there needs to be some setting in Dell or Windows that somehow prioritize USB-C eGPUs. I just haven't been able to find anything.
Anyone experience the same thing?