Severe DPC latency spikes causing system freezes (ndis.sys / nvlddmkm.sys)
I have an Acer Nitro V15 51 laptop with an i5-13420H, RTX 4050, and 16 GB of RAM running an updated Windows 11 (with NVIDIA drivers also up to date). The system has always been stable for about 2 years, including during gaming and multitasking, but recently it started showing sudden and repetitive freezes, always in contexts of moderately heavy multimedia usage: playing light games while using Discord in a call and/or recording the screen with OBS Studio or Medal.
During these episodes, the system behavior is as follows: the audio freezes first, then the system starts to stutter heavily (mouse and interface freeze for a few seconds), then it briefly “recovers” and becomes responsive for a moment, and then it freezes again more severely until a forced restart is required. In at least one case, there was a blue screen with the stop code CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT (0x101).
Outside of these scenarios, the PC works normally without apparent freezes. I ran system integrity tests (sfc /scannow) and no errors were found. The SSD was checked with CrystalDiskInfo and appears healthy, with no signs of degradation. I used LatencyMon to test the PC, and it consistently reported difficulties for the system to handle real-time tasks, pointing to DPC routines with excessive execution time.
In driver analysis, the top entries were “ndis.sys” and “nvlddmkm.sys”, and after testing with the network adapter driver disabled, “Wdf01000.sys” appeared at the top. LatencyMon itself suggested a possible relation to networking as well as power management/throttling. The system’s Wi-Fi adapter is a MediaTek Wi-Fi 6 MT7921.
Does anyone suggest a possible solution?