Question PC crashing on startup and during diagnostics

Sep 19, 2022
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For the past couple months I had been having random crashes every few weeks so I really hadn’t thought anything of it, but the other day I left my PC on overnight, nothing irregular, and it crashed overnight. No changes in hardware or software prior to this. Since then, it’s been mostly unusable. It crashes during startup, during log in, a minute or so after startup while loading programs. I’ve managed to make it into safe mode a few times but it crashes in safe mode and also during shutdown from safe mode. I’ve tried to run several memory tests but it’s never made it any further than 6% before crashing again, and I’ve tried to run startup repair but repeatedly crashes during that also. However, I did manage to run a disk drive test which gave me the OK status for both drives, and I also managed to disable fast startup in BIOS. I did some troubleshooting and found that whether the PC is plugged into a surge protector or wall outlet made no difference, but I did find that my PC did not crash when started without a monitor attached by HDMI. It seems to only crash when any monitor is attached (I tried several monitors). This led me to believe that it was an issue with the GPU (even though I haven’t had any other symptoms of GPU problems) so I blew out my PC and deep cleaned my GPU, also checking for any burnt smell which there was none of and also appeared to be no corrosion anywhere. After doing so, I was able to fully start my PC and access windows in normal mode with no data loss and no issues other than it running substantially slow. Task manager showed no issues. I preformed mild stress tests with no issues, and kept it on for about 10 minutes before shutting it down myself with no crash on shutdown. I thought my problem was solved until I tried to turn it on again and it immediately crashed once again and is acting the same as before the deep clean. My next thought was that it could have been an issue with the PSU, which was about a decade old so I went ahead and replaced it but there still has been no improvements. I did check the event viewer, where I’ve received hundreds of critical, error and warning events in the past 7 days. There’s a very wide variety of them and unfortunately I don’t know what any of them mean. Are there any specific ones I should look out for?
I also wanted to specify that when I say “crash” I mean that my PC in it’s entirety shuts off in an instant. Faster than if I had unplugged it or flipped the power switch. Nothing is left running whatsoever, no lights left on. The longer that I leave my PC alone between startups, the longer it allows me to use it before crashing again, and when I restart it several times in a row it crashes sooner each time. I’m thinking this is caused by an issue with my CPU and that I will need to replace it as it is also about a decade old. Is there anything else that I can do, any sure signs of this being caused by something else, or any ways I can know for sure that this is a CPU issue before spending the money to replace it?
Please help :/
P.S I really don’t want to factory reset my PC. That’s last resort, ok?!
 
Sep 19, 2022
6
0
10
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor
MOBO: Asus STRIX B350-F GAMING ATX AM4
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB Video Card
PSU: Thermaltake Smart 700 W 80+ Certified ATX
OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit