Samuel Haddad
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RX 7900 XTX freezes from Windows Modern Standby

My dual monitors would freeze. Sometimes red pixels showed up, the machine beeped, and I had to hold the power button. After a reboot the AMD card was often disabled and only one screen came back. Overnight it started throwing a real bugcheck: VIDEO_SCHEDULER_INTERNAL_ERROR (0x119) while Connected Standby was in progress.

The machine

  • Alienware Aurora R15 AMD
  • AMD Ryzen 9 7900X
  • Dell OEM AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
  • Two Dell S2725DS monitors on HDMI
  • Windows 11

Driver updates and a BIOS flash did not stop it. Sleep in Windows Settings was already set to Never. The machine was still going into a laptop-style sleep path.

What Modern Standby is

Modern Standby is S0 Low Power Idle, also called Connected Standby. The PC looks asleep, but it stays in a low-power S0 state with the network up instead of using old S3 sleep. Laptops like that. A desktop with a 355 W discrete GPU often does not. The 7900 XTX was failing on that power transition.

powercfg /a showed S0 was available even though S3 was not:

powercfg /a

You want to see Standby (S0 Low Power Idle). If that line is there, Windows can still park the GPU when the screens turn off.

Turning it off

Run an elevated Command Prompt or PowerShell, then:

reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power" /v PlatformAoAcOverride /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power" /v CsEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Reboot. Check again:

powercfg /a

Standby (S0 Low Power Idle) should be gone. The box can stay awake or hibernate. It should not sneak into Modern Standby anymore.

PowerShell does the same thing:

Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power' -Name PlatformAoAcOverride -Type DWord -Value 0
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power' -Name CsEnabled -Type DWord -Value 0

Reboot after that too.