Hello,
I have been experiencing a serious issue with my Acer Aspire 5 A515-45 laptop for several months. I encounter daily BSODs that occur spontaneously without any obvious cause. WinDbg does not indicate any specific driver being responsible.
I have performed extensive hardware tests with no errors:
- SSD: tested in another laptop running Windows for a week with no issues.
- RAM: tested with MemTest86 (2x 4 and 8 passes), Windows Memory Diagnostic, TestMem5, OCCT.
- CPU and GPU: tested with OCCT and Prime95.
The latest BIOS update (v1.55, related to certificates) made the system even more unstable, causing freezes where the laptop becomes unresponsive, the fan ramps up, and I can only recover by forcing shutdown with the power button. The same behavior also occurs under Linux Mint.
What is interesting is that the BSODs usually happen under light to medium load. During heavy stress tests with OCCT, they do not appear. However, on rare occasions OCCT reports CPU errors (only in the CPU + RAM test), always on physical core 7 (logical core 15), but only when using the chipset driver provided by Acer. With the AMD chipset driver, this does not happen.
Based on these results, I suspected an issue with CPU idle states. I tried disabling “Processor idle” in the Processor power management settings, and this resulted in zero BSODs. The problem is that the CPU then stays locked at 100%, with temperatures reaching 70–80 °C. I also tried limiting the maximum processor state to 99% (which disables turbo boost). In this case, temperatures stayed below 50 °C, but the system became sluggish, especially when copying files to the SSD, performing worse than a regular HDD.
From a hardware perspective, I inspected the motherboard and measured voltages and temperatures — everything looks fine.
So my questions are:
- Could this indicate a defective CPU, VRM, or RAM?
- Or is it a BIOS issue, such as incorrect voltage settings for certain cores? (I know that not all processors are perfectly uniform — sometimes a core may require slightly higher or lower voltage to function correctly.)
- Could this be a factory defect? I experienced occasional BSODs even when I first purchased the laptop, but only rarely, and usually when resuming from sleep mode. For nearly 3 years, it worked flawlessly otherwise.
The BSODs I typically encounter are:
- IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (very frequent)
- PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (frequent, especially recently)
- KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (rare)
- SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (occasional)
- CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED (very rare)
Thank you in advance for your assistance.
