Lately my Razer 17 2022 has been experiencing constant crashes coming out of sleep or hibernation. Did a full system reset, reinstalled windows, updated drivers, firmware etc. The issue persisted. Ran a full analysis on the memory dump files. The graphics card, running on the latest Nvidia Studio Driver, is crashing trying to activate the secondary display on my thunderbolt 4 dock. Last thread on similar problems was 3 years ago. Solution back then was rolling back an Nvidia Driver. Not sure which version to roll back to now or when the issue appeared. I let Claude Opus 4.6 do some research on the topic for me. It returned this:
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Claude:
There's a well-documented, widespread NVIDIA driver instability issue that is directly relevant to your problem. Here's the key findings from going through the release notes and community reports:
The problem started with the 572.xx driver branch (released January-February 2025, coinciding with the RTX 50 series launch). GamersNexus was able to replicate widespread driver stability issues including crashes, black screens, and system reboots. They found it affected not just 50-series GPUs but also 40 and 30 series cards. GamersNexus This is your Razer Blade 17's generation.
Sleep/resume is specifically called out. Multiple reports confirm issues with waking from sleep or resuming from idle states, where monitors turn on but don't receive signal and the screens remain black, requiring a reboot. GamersNexus This matches your Thunderbolt dock/secondary display crash pattern exactly.
Another user reported that driver 576.52 specifically broke Modern Standby S0 sleep mode — the screen would no longer wake up after sleep and would then BSOD. Eleven Forum They resolved it by reverting to older drivers.
The recommended rollback target: Studio Driver 566.36 (released December 5, 2024)
Both GamersNexus testing and widespread user reports point to 566.36 as the most stable recent driver. GamersNexus Game developers including inZOI explicitly recommended rolling back to 566.36, stating that driver versions 572.xx or later may cause issues. GamersNexus
If 566.36 doesn't work, try 566.14 (released November 12, 2024). Some users reported 566.36 itself had issues for certain configurations, and 566.14 was the fallback.
Your rollback plan should be:
- 566.36 (Dec 2024) — first try, most widely recommended stable version
- 566.14 (Nov 2024) — fallback if 566.36 has issues
- 565.90 (Oct 2024) — if neither of the above works
That's only ~2-4 months before your current driver branch — nothing ancient. Use DDU in Safe Mode for clean installs between each attempt.
Known issues in recent drivers that are relevant to your specific setup (from the release notes I reviewed): 576.02 lists a known issue where RTX 50 series notebooks can get black screens resuming from Modern Standby Station-Drivers, and 580.97 lists known issues including "for some systems running hybrid graphics mode, dGPU may not go to sleep" Station-Drivers — both suggest NVIDIA has been aware of sleep/display resume problems for months across multiple driver versions without fully resolving them in the 572+ branch.
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I will be trying 566.36 (Dec 2024) and report back on how it went.