Problem with blue screens and watchdog violation 0x133 on MSI Katana

Hello!

I’m dealing with a strange issue on my MSI Katana 15 B12VGK. About a year ago I started getting blue screens while playing games like Zenless Zone Zero or Genshin Impact. At a random moment the game freezes on one frame, and after 2–3 minutes the laptop crashes and shows a blue screen with the error “DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION 0x133.”

This only happened in those two games, so I assumed it was an optimization issue. I could play games like The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 without problems.

Recently I decided to finally fix the issue. I contacted the support teams for the games and MSI. I tried the following:

  • Reinstalling drivers
  • Installing the stable drivers from MSI’s website (this actually made the BSODs more frequent)
  • Cleaning and repasting the laptop
  • Installing new RAM
  • Updating the BIOS
  • Turning on discrete GPU mode in MSI Center
  • Setting maximum performance for the GPU in the Nvidia Control Panel

Nothing helped. So I decided to try using AI for advice (not the best idea, but I was desperate). It suggested disabling C-states in the BIOS and turning off ASPM. It also claimed that my SSD (Micron 2400) was too slow and unstable, and that giving it more power might help.

These changes helped a little, but didn’t solve the problem. I still get freezes, but now without BSODs — instead, the laptop just reboots after freezing for about two minutes. The freezes also happen less often now. However, recently the same issue appeared in Spider-Man: Miles Morales, so it’s clearly not limited to just two games.

I don’t have the budget to buy a new SSD right now, especially since I’m not sure it will fix the issue.

I’m including a Google Drive link with my system information, two GPU-Z logs (one before following the AI advice, one after), Windows minidump files, and WhoCrashed reports: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1...

Thank you for any help.

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Hi @arseni79787

Check in Event Viewer for any Critical, Error or Warning events that may be logged at the time the problem occurs.

Also check for any events that have a lot of entries as well as it may give some clues as to what is happening.

crwdns2934271:0crwdnd2934271:0crwdne2934271:0

So every time crush occurs i have this two errors: volmgr162 and kernel-power 41 (63). Here are logs:

Log Name: System

Source: volmgr

Date: 30/11/2025 13:58:44

Event ID: 162

Task Category: None

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: ARSPIATR

Description:

Dump file generation succeded.

Event Xml:

<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08...>

<System>

<Provider Name="volmgr" />

<EventID Qualifiers="4">162</EventID>

<Version>0</Version>

<Level>2</Level>

<Task>0</Task>

<Opcode>0</Opcode>

<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>

<TimeCreated SystemTime="2025-11-30T12:58:44.0571349Z" />

<EventRecordID>287847</EventRecordID>

<Correlation />

<Execution ProcessID="4" ThreadID="448" />

<Channel>System</Channel>

<Computer>ARSPIATR</Computer>

<Security />

</System>

<EventData>

<Data>\Device\HarddiskVolume3</Data>

<Binary>000000000100000000000000A2000400B50C0000000

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