Wacom Forum - Wacom Europe GmbH

Dear Wacom,

After leisurely testing my new MSP 16 over the holidays (screen and drawing experience is awesome) I finally traveled to the studio of a client abroad to do some actual work on it. The moment I started working with the MSP on a medium-size file in Photoshop (1920x1080, 20+ layers) it froze up. I figured this was probably a fluke so I tried again, but over the rest of the day it kept freezing up; screen is on but no input work, not the keyboard, pen, mouse or expressk-keys on the side. The weird thing is that in the beginning I could run everything I threw at it, Zbrush, Photoshop, 3DsMax and Clip Studio. Now it's pretty much unusable for work.

I noticed that part of the MSP felt really hot and that the fans don't really seem to pick-up speed when the load on the GPU and CPU increased. Things like rendering on the GPU with 3DsMax was no problem a week before but now the screen flickers and 3DsMax crashes before the MSP shows a BSOD. The more I tried to find the problem the more I was running into freezes that end up with a BSOD.

Here's a list of things I tried to fix it:

- I tried to restrict the CPU to 80% in the power option to see if that could remedy it. No luck.
- Installed the latest GPU driver for the Quadro M1000m. No luck.
- Installed the latest Wacom driver (release 04/01/2017). No luck
- Assigned only the Quadro card to run (so restricted the Intel GPU) with Photoshop and 3DsMax. No luck
- I tried to run a benchmark (3DMark), first it froze up the MSP. After letting the MSP cool down a bit I tried it again and managed to get 1FPS max in it before it crashed the MSP again.

I've got the MSP off of the table on a stand that allows a lot of airflow, none of the fans are blocked but still the MSP gets very hot in minutes of just running photoshop.

I've seen on reddit that more people have problems with BSODs, overheating, and crashes. Is there anyone here with the same problems? Is Wacom aware of these issues or do I have a faulty device?

Any help or advice would be very much appreciated as I'm think about returning it.

PS: During my travels I kept it in my hand luggage, in a padded sleeve surrounded my clothes to protect it even more. There were no drops or hard bumps since I have it.)

I've had my 16/512GB model for about a week. It was working fine initially, and then got to where it would intermittently shut down completely and without warning. I'm not sure how to go about diagnosing it. I don't have a lot of apps on it (photoshop, some drawing apps, etc). But I did notice, for example, that watching youtube via Chrome resulted in the fan running a lot and choppy video. Switching over to Edge seemed to make that experience much better. So, I'm wondering if there's something related to Chrome which is causing it to shut down. Trying to hit it hard today to see if I can make it crash without using Chrome.

Eric

I had this issue with my first MSP 16. It froze up randomly in Photoshop, had to hard restart repeatedly. I tried reinstalling all the drivers, then it was locking up so often that I factory restored it (by then I was just hoping I somehow installed the wrong driver). Finally got Photoshop installed again, and it froze for the last time. It didn't turn on again. It would intermittently start the fans and the screen would light up for a second with no logos, etc, and get very hot- but it never turned on again.

I sent it back to Amazon and have another new one. I still have an issue with the screen flickering around the cursor (not the cursor itself, but the screen around it on only half of the screen) that was present on the old machine too. Uggh.

Hey Guys,

I was plagued with the exact same problem and I (think) found a fix. Or at least I found someone that found a fix :)
Here is what worked for me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wacom/comments ... h=86edd0e8
Since I did the above trick my MSP 16 hasn't crashed once. And it would usually randomly reboot a lot to the point that I was about to return the damn thing.
Now the only thing that I need to sort is the calibration which is a bit weird and seems to change from session to session.
Other than that I love my MSP :)
Tell me if the above solution works for you. If it does, Wacom really needs to do something about it...

Pyer

@pyercoffin, thank you for the recommendation. I just got one for my daughter (MSP16 512) and loaded ZBrush 4R7, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Autodesk SketchBook Pro. She has not used it enough to put it under stress but I will bookmark this just in case she does.

Has anyone here had Wacom to respond to this issue? I orginally contacted support and they walked me through resetting the system entirely when I was getting crashes from what I perceived as overheating. Was working fine for quite awhile but recently it crashed like 3 times almost back to back whilst working. I changed the processor power setting to be a bit lower so it wasn't running so hot when but that doesn't seem to have helped really.

@dubbmobile
Hey! Have you tried my suggestion above?
I had all sorts of crash and they all went away by doing the tweak.

pyercoffin wrote:@dubbmobile
Hey! Have you tried my suggestion above?
I had all sorts of crash and they all went away by doing the tweak.

Yah know I haven't yet. I swear I read somewhere the above tweak will basically bypass using the quaddro card. Is this not the case?

Same problem here.
Worked fine in the beginning (1-2 two weeks only used in the evenings). Now it restarts (nothing to do with windows update) or shuts down after some time.
And I have been running only Photoshop so far, no Zbrush or 3dsmax yet !!!!
After restarting often the tablet driver isn´t working, so no pen control anymore. Only thing that helps is deinstalling
and reinstalling the driver ... until the next crash and lost work. I´m assuming the problem is overheating.

I´m sorry ... but dear people from wacom. Why don´t you test your product before selling it for more than 3K Euro (I´m from Germany)!?!
In this condition it is not usable as mobile workstation.

I will try the bios workaround suggested here, but is that the official wacom strategy to solve the problem?
Any suggestions from the support?
I´m thinking about sending mine back. Very dissapointed. :(

So here is, what I found out so far.
I updated the nvidia driver to the current version 376.84.
I´m still experiencing sudden reboots.
The good news is, I don´t think it is because of overheating.

- the reboots appear only on maximum power setting in the windows mobility center.

I can cause crashes/reboots when using f. e. substance painter.
sometimes it runs as long as substance painter is not maximised on the
screen (as in the first screenshot attached). When I maximise it, the unit reboots.
As you can see in the first screenshot the temperatures seem to be Ok.
Sometimes I can work on 2-3 Substance files after another and nothings happens.
Then I open one file I had opened before and the system reboots.
Then it rebooted again immediately after login in to windows before opening any programms.

http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4650 ... 7t_jpg.htm

So it thought, Ok, may be it is getting hot and needs to cool down.
But then after restarting again I immediately opened substance painter and let the unit
render with IRay (which uses CPU and GPU all together) for almost 15 minutes and the unit
didn´t crash.
The second screenshot was taken while rendering with Iray. The temperatures seem to be
Ok, only the Intel graphic chip gets pretty hot with 88 degrees.
But the quadro seems fine with 69, the Cpu about 70 - 73.

http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4650 ... de_jpg.htm

So it doesn´t seem to be the heat, but it is caused definitely by the heavy use of the quadro card.
Maybe it doesn´t get enough volts?
I bought the devise to work with substance, UE4, Zbrush and Photoshop and the reboots appearing with
all of this software make it impossible to work with. Setting it on minimum power to browse the internet is not what it is
intended for.

Dear wacom team, what can I do from here?
When I contact the support do I have to send it in?
(I bought it in a german online hardware store, do I have to send it directly to wacom Germany?)
Can this be a hardware flaw that needs to be repaired?
Or can it be fixed with software? Are you aware of this issue?
It also listed here in this bug list as something that appears with some units:

OTHER REPORTED ISSUES

These issues may not be properly confirmed, but have been reported enough times to raise concerns

When using programs that heavily rely on the nVidia GPU the device will power off

https://www.reddit.com/r/wacom/comments ... o_buglist/

Im thankful for advise. I love the unit and really want to keep and use it. But the
reboot problem makes it impossible to rely on.

Thanks