"Default Radeon WattMan settings have been restored due to unexpected system failure"

[imrazor]

Lately I've been finding my laptop going into a coma. I'll return to it after being away for a few minutes and find it unresponsive. Power light is on, but tapping any of the keys or moving the mouse will not wake it up. This happens even if I put the laptop in High Performance (i.e., no sleep) mode in Power Options. Upon reboot I get the message:

"Default Radeon WattMan settings have been restored due to unexpected system failure"

My research indicates that Wattman is some kind of overclocking utility for the AMD RX 4x0 series. Things is I have an AMD FirePro M6100, which is a GCN 1.1 series chip and shouldn't even have WattMan. How do I get rid of WattMan and prevent coma-mode on my laptop?

EDIT: Laptop specs

Windows 10 x64
AMD Crimson drivers 16.9 (.1?)
Dell Precision M6600
16GB DDR3-1600 RAM
Crucial MX100 256GB SSD
AMD FirePro M6100 2GB

 

[Shaun o]

Strictly speaking, the problem is in fact to do with windows, and its signaling to the laptops motherboard to enter a sleep state and a wake up state.

In part it is mainly more to do with how the bios of the laptop is set up and it`s power management features set and used for the Apci settings of the laptop Imrazor.

In the laptops bios make sure Apci mode is is set to enabled from the power menu if one exists in the bios settings.
For the S mode short for suspend signaling and wake up signaling.

Try setting the S mode options to S1-S3 mode or S1- S4 mode.

S1-S3 mode when selected in the bios will signal the laptops motherboard to power down or for any hardware devices attached to the interfaces of the laptops motherboard to enter a low power state or sleep mode. the power to the ram or memory modules of the laptop is always present, as memory is classed as volatile storage.

It means it has to have a constant feed of electricity fed to it because as soon as the current is lost all data contained in the memory is lost or reset.
But what it does is keep the memory of the laptop with a supply of current to retain all of the current data stored and running of windows, it is the fastest way for a system to resume from a sleep state since windows once loaded from a hard drive or ssd drive of the laptop is always memory resident as the working os.

The second option of S1-S4 works in a slightly different way .
It dumps the contents of the system memory or ram in the current state it is as a temporary image file or snapshot to a file on the hard drive, and then flushes the contents of the system memory, then cutting power to the memory also as well to reduce power consumption.
When the system is woke up by a keyboard, or a mouse, track pad button or movement of the mouse.
The normal system power state is resumed of the laptop and all connected devices to the motherboard are sent the Apci signal to resume a normal power state.

The temp system image or snapshot of the state of the ram as an image file from the hard drive is then loaded back to main system memory Imrazor.

In both situations by failing to make sure Apci mode is enabled in the bios settings and also the correct set of S modes pre selected is why a motherboard or parts of it do not respond to the system wake up event signal sent.

So you need to make the changes in the bios of the laptop, and once set make sure you save the changes before you exit the bios.
The laptop should then work properly and wake up all hardware of the laptop to a full power state Imrazor.

I hope this helped you resolve the wake up problem the non resume state of the laptop when trying to wake it from a sleep state mode, try it anyway it should work fine as I said once you select the correct settings in the bios and make sure Apci is enabled.

 

[imrazor]

Thanks for the overview of S states on laptops. However, the problem only started recently and no changes have been made to the BIOS. The difficulty *seemed* to coincide with a recent driver update. So I think it's a driver problem as opposed to a BIOS issue, though I could be wrong. Also, a further data point is that the laptop only seems to lock up when I leave a game or full screen 3D app running. It will resume from sleep from a Windows desktop, or even if I close the lid and no 3d apps are running. Might it be a GPU power management issue caused by a bad driver update, as opposed to a BIOS setting? I can't seem to find the relevant settings in the Radeon Pro app....

Next time I reboot the laptop I will look at the BIOS, but I don't seem to recall any ACPI/S3/S4 settings.

 

[imrazor]

So I went into the BIOS and checked the settings. There was nothing about ACPI or S3/S4, but there was a "C states" setting which was already enabled. Just to be sure I turned on "Wake on AC" and "Wake on USB". However, I think the keyboard is PS/2, so it should have woken up anyway. But I'll monitor the laptop and report back whether it worked or not.

 

[imrazor]

For the sake of posterity, I just wanted to post that a driver update resolved the issue. I did not have to change anything in BIOS or power management settings.

 

[Kale2]

For the sake of posterity, I just wanted to post that a driver update resolved the issue. I did not have to change anything in BIOS or power management settings.

what driver update did you fix it with? I'm having the same issue as you are, but I'm on a desktop

 

[imrazor]

I was on 16.9.something. IIRC, I updated to 16.11. It may not be the specific driver version, but just installing over top of the old one may have reset a registry setting. Couldn't venture to guess which one.

 

[Kale2]

I was on 16.9.something. IIRC, I updated to 16.11. It may not be the specific driver version, but just installing over top of the old one may have reset a registry setting. Couldn't venture to guess which one.

thanks for the reply, what I ended up doing was I completely uninstalled my driver, restarted computer and then re installed the driver and it seems to be working fine. I was on the newly released 16.12.(something) driver

edit: ignore what I just said this did not work there seems to be an issue with the driver so I'm going to downgrade and see what happens