[Darryl Ramm]

Ugh, well folks who might have real suggestions here may not see this because of the mislabeling this thread “video” vs. “graphics”.

Unfortunately Pro Tools performance on Windows laptops is a frequent crap-shoot. I would try all this quickly with an eye to returning the laptop if you do not make progress.

Here is what I would try.

Make sure nothing else is running, no web browsers etc.

Work with a trivial test session.

Install/reinstall the latest NVIDIA drivers for your GPUs. Do the install manually (*not* using Microsoft update crapware), ideally use installers directly from NVIDIA not Dell.

Go over systems optimization again, do as much as you can, all the bios settings, disable networking etc. just try to get it working smoothly at all.

Trash prefs frequently as you test.

Make sure the laptop reports seeing/using the GPU. Play around looking at what NVIDIA driver settings are provided and maybe try different settings... I have no idea what is there. ... I am am suspicious your laptop is only running on Intel integrated graphics, at least while the Sandra report was made, that’s all that is listed under “video system”.... I am not sure what to expect there on this laptop, or what controls the system/drivers supply.

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You probably should leave cache set to a few GB not normal, especially recording to a USB stick leave it set that way until you run out of memory. Recording to a USB flash stick may not be a good idea, well not for heavy sessions, some USB sticks have bad performance properties, like suddenly the performance collapsing at a certain load or amount of data written. The external USB SSD I would reach for that I trust most is a Samsung T5. But either way nothing there is related to your graphics glitches.

Any recording drive also needs to be formatted as NTFS, you cannot reliably record to exFAT, so be careful there as well with USB sticks.

I personally would not be using bit locker/file system encryption on a DAW computer.. on any filesystem.