ASUS Gaming Laptop Stutters Giving You Fits? It May Be This Nasty Firmware Bug

Update @5PM on 9/17/25: ASUS has responded to this report on its official Twitter account, acknowledging these reported issues and investigating the cause and potential fixes.

If you've noticed odd stutters or audio crackles when using an ASUS laptop, you aren't the only one. And just yesterday, Reddit user u/ZephKeks (Zephkek on GitHub) posted an explosive deep dive revealing exactly why that is. It turns out that these issues with ASUS laptops aren't down to Windows 11's idiosyncrasies, but rather reportedly faulty BIOS firmware that causes ACPI.sys spikes. This results in high latency on standard tasks, difficulty processing audio, and periodic hard hitches or audio crackling anomalies. What's worse is that this issue is allegedly reproducible on seemingly every ASUS laptop made since about 2021, and there's no real recourse on the user end for fixing these problems on most of these machines.


So what does that mean for you, the end user? Well, if you're already an owner of one of these ASUS gaming laptops, it's probably a good time to send some emails or make some calls to demand a BIOS revision to properly fix the issue. With these issues present, though, it becomes difficult for us to recommend ASUS gaming laptops knowing that this problem is present, despite them usually boasting excellent performance and good build quality. As something of a silver lining, it might only impact laptops that come with an iGPU and a discrete GPU—if your system is solely using integrated graphics, this issue may not impact you. It would explain why handhelds like the Asus ROG Ally X don't seem to experience the problem at all.

The reason we posit this is because of what's going on under the hood with the problem. As Zephkeks explains, the ACPI.sys spikes are not only unusual, but seem to be tied to faulty detection of iGPU and discrete GPU status. This results in consistent power cycling on a discrete GPU that's supposed to be permanently enabled, as well as some serious added latency due to all of these faulty calls being tied to Core 0 on the CPU. The cumulative result gives us the aforementioned audio crackling and general latency issues, but in particularly unlucky circumstances, can also cause a full system crash.

For readers interested in the full deep dive, the GitHub post goes into far more detail than the Reddit post that kicked this story into the news cycle. User commentary in the original thread does have some of its own amusement value, though, including several expletives and testimonies from other impacted users.