Question Is a component dying and if so which one?? Help me…….

[Twistfaria]

I was getting help in the Win 10 forum but I now suspect that it is a hardware issue and not a software driver issue. Since the 28th of October I’ve been trying to troubleshoot what is wrong with my system. It has been getting progressively worse since then.
This started when my system crashed during a Windows update on the 28th. After that my system started to crash, restart and BSOD at random. The BSODs were always DPC watchdog violation. After getting some help and also finding the program WhoCrashed it seemed to be pointing to Amdppm.sys as the driver that was crashing the system. This is the Microsoft driver that manages the CPUs power states. I found a post online that suggested a few things, one of which seemed to help…for a few days. It suggested editing the registry to make the driver having a start value of 4 rather than 3. This caused almost all crashing to stop. There was one crash after that was a total system freeze and I actually had to flip the switch on the power supply to get the computer to power down. Holding the power button down did nothing!

Then windows decided to do another update. That switched my registry back so I had to redo that but since then the computer has basically stopped responding. I was getting crashes after the update so I decided to do a system restore from right before the update. Sadly it crashed during the restore. After a few attempts the system stopped being able to even boot into windows. I had made a USB stick to repair windows earlier in the troubleshooting process so I tried that out. The system now crashes when trying to access ANYTHING other than the BIOS. I can fully explore the BIOS but as soon as I try to boot to windows or the USB it crashes. Sometimes it made a loop where it just kept posting and restarting.

One of the things that WhoCrashed thought it could be was a thermal issue so back then, when the system was working a bit, I checked the temps with no load and then with a benchmark in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All temps were well within operating range. I know it’s not a RAM issue because I got 4 clean passes with memtest86+
I suspect it is either the CPU or the power supply though I guess the mobo isn’t out of the question either.

If you want a full rundown of pretty much everything that I’ve done this is the thread that has all the info: https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...estarting-freezing-after-hard-reboot.3825040/

Does anyone have enough experience that they can tell me what they think is failing? I do actually have another CPU that would fit in the AM4 socket, though I have zero experience with putting a different CPU into the same setup. Is there anything I should know before pulling the CPU from my other system and trying it in this one? If it is the CPU what results should I actually expect? Will the system “work” with a different CPU? I made this system two years ago and I believe both the CPU and the mobo are still under warranty I haven’t checked if the PSU is. The main reason I haven’t already changed them out is that both systems are in hard to access locations so I want as much knowledge as I can get before I go through the trouble.

Any help is much appreciated!!

Here’s the parts list for my system: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Twistfaria/saved/#view=hNpnt6
The other CPU I can try is from the system in my signature.

 

[Ralston18]

Look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer.

Either one or both tools may be capturing some related error codes, warnings, or even informational events.

Use both tools but only one tool at a time.

Start with Reliability History. Much more end user friendly and the timeline format may reveal patterns.

Event Viewer requires much more time and effort to navigate and understand.

To help with Event Viewer:

How To - How to use Windows 10 Event Viewer | Tom's Hardware Forum (tomshardware.com)

Take your time, be methodical, and do not immediately react to actual or perceived problems. Do additional research on what is discoverd and, of course, post such information herein.

And do stay out of the registry. Registry edits are a last resort and should only be attempted after a full system backup that also includes the Registry itself.

 

[Twistfaria]

I really appreciate help but as I said above I CANNOT boot into windows at this point at all! I can’t even boot into the USB to attempt to repair windows.

The registry edit I made only changes that driver to start manually rather than automatically. I only did it so I could continue troubleshooting seeing as the system was literally crashing every 3-8 minutes. It was purely a stopgap.
Prior to that I was using Driver Verifier to try to get more information from crash minidumps but with it running I was not getting any crashes just system lag while it stressed the drivers. However the driver a full memory dump pointed to “amdppm.sys” was not one of the ones Driver Verifier was testing.

The system went from zero issues for the last 2 years to crashes every day to crashes every hour to crashes every few minutes and now to crashes in seconds. I can’t see how this could be a software issue anymore.

 

[TCL987]

I've been having a similar issue since mid-Sept. when Windows installed an update. When it first happened I uninstalled the update and the issue went away for a month until Windows Update unpaused. My system either freezes or crashes with a DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION BSOD but the minidump progress is stuck at 0%. Even trying to use remote kernel debugging fails to identify which driver is actually causing my freezing.

Most recently I thought it was an issue with my motherboard's on-board NIC so I switched to a different one and the issue went away for a week, but now it's happening again.

 

[Twistfaria]

Yeah many of my BSODs didn’t trigger dumps either. At some point I accidentally changed it to a full dump rather than a mini. I only realized that after seeing that it was 67gb rather than the 2.5gb the minis are. That full one is the one that WhoCrashed was finally able to point to a driver. But now that I can only access the bios I’m doubting that it was a driver issue. Although it does seem very suspicious that the whole thing started with a freeze during an update! But I don’t understand if it was a driver issue why it would get worse. Or why it would now also freeze when trying to boot to the USB. I’ve never had an issue that I had to troubleshoot for this long. I’ve also never had to RMA a part that was failing. I once had to return a cpu radiator that just wouldn’t latch on but never something that I’d actually been using in a system.
It’s so frustrating when something seems to have worked only for it to start happening again! I thought it was very odd that my system stopped crashing while Driver Verifier was on but someone here said they’d seen that before. I hate it when things don’t make sense!!

 

[Twistfaria]

Just wanted to say that it was my CPU that died! After burning out on this issue I shelved computers for like 6 months and just put it out of my mind. When I finally got over it enough to restart I just bought another CPU and stuck it in there to see if that was the issue. Lo and behold it literally just started right up! Then I realized that my old CPU was only under warranty for another 2 months so I shipped it off to AMD in Florida. They checked it out and then sent me a new one. So now I have TWO lol!