I mostly just wanted to post this here in case it may be helpful to anyone else in the future:

I recently got my new Aurora R15 with an RTX 4080. Flat screen games seemed fine, but when I set my Index up on it, I was getting extreme stuttering, even just in the SteamVR Home app. After looking through several issues that seemed to exist between SteamVR and the NVidia drivers that were causing similar issues several months ago, I had tried several different things and the stuttering remained. This was happening just as bad at 90 Hz, 120 Hz, and 144 Hz (even though the exact same Index has been running flawlessly at 144 Hz on my RTX 2070 Super paired with a far older 5th-gen i7 CPU in a different computer for the last 3 years.)

Then I just disabled the AWCC service (and all of the other Dell services, such as those related to  SA (SupportAssist)) and the problem completely vanished. Instead of having many reprojected frames about every 1.5 seconds, I now have none at all, as expected. Turned the AWCC service back on just to check whether running that without SA was a problem or not and the stuttering was back and still pretty bad, though it subjectively didn't feel quite as bad was when SA was also running. I then turned the AWCC service back off again and all is good, so this confirms that the AWCC service was indeed the problem.

So, if you're planning to use your Alienware system for VR (at least with an RTX 40-series card,) you'll likely need to disable AWCC once you get your fan and overclocking settings configured as you want them.

It would be great if Dell (or, if it's a bug with the driver query API, NVidia?) could fix this, as being able to control the lights, fans, and overclocking and monitor temperatures without bringing the video card to its knees would be handy.

To disable the AWCC service, of course, one option is to simply uninstall AWCC entirely. However, if you want to leave it installed in case you need to adjust settings, you can manually turn its background service on and off. By default, it starts up when Windows starts up. However, you can change this in the Services control panel (or with the command-line utilities, such as sc.)

To disable the AWCC service from the Services control panel:
- Run services.msc
- Scroll down to AWCCService.
- Right-click AWCCService and select "Stop"
- Right-click AWCCService and select "Properties"
- Change "Startup type" to either "Manual" or "Disabled"

(As the names of those options imply, "Manual" means that a command has to be issued to Windows manually to start the AWCC service rather than it starting automatically when the computer boots, while "Disabled" means that it can't be started at all until the startup type is changed to something else.)