Question PC hard crash -- not even a BSOD

[Toad_85]

All -- appreciate any insight you can give me on this. Basically just looking for pointers on where to go from here.

Long story short, my desktop computer's been hard crashing occasionally -- just black screen, no sound or video, no BSOD -- only recovers with a full power cycle. Happens mostly when I'm gaming, so I'm initially thinking video card issue, but I need to narrow it down...

I head to Event Viewer and try to pull up the crash logs. Looks like it crashes so quickly and so hard that there's not much in the logs... mostly a bunch of events like this:

The previous system shutdown at 8:58:28 PM on ‎11/‎25/‎2022 was unexpected.​

Then I find this gem in Event Viewer, reported by the "WHEA-Logger", which apparently stands for the "Windows Hardware Error Architecture". Oh yay:

A fatal hardware error has occurred.​

​

Reported by component: Processor Core​

Error Source: Machine Check Exception​

Error Type: Cache Hierarchy Error​

Processor APIC ID: 15​

That sounds dire... but I'm unsure as to how to poke at this any further.

Basic system info (~5 years old):

OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Home​

Processor AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor, 3400 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)​

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB​

Adapter Description Radeon RX 580 Series​

 

[drivinfast247]

What PSU?

 

[Toad_85]

What PSU?

Hmm, yeah, after poking around the forums further, that seems to be the first thing to look at...

OK, so without cracking the case open I'm not sure of the exact model and vendor, but this is the line item from the order when I built it with CyberPowerPC:

POWERSUPPLY: 600 Watts - Standard 80 Plus Certified Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready ​

Seems pretty generic, perhaps this is the problem? Although it's been fine since 2017...

Update: I re-created the crash again just now, watching the metrics real-time from AMD's monitoring software, and it ran fine as long as the GPU draw stayed below 100 Watts... it crashed within seconds of hitting 125 Watts.

 

[Nephern]

that sounds like a broken capacitor on the gpu. that would have to be resautered, try another gpu in your system.

 

[drivinfast247]

Hmm, yeah, after poking around the forums further, that seems to be the first thing to look at...

OK, so without cracking the case open I'm not sure of the exact model and vendor, but this is the line item from the order when I built it with CyberPowerPC:

POWERSUPPLY: 600 Watts - Standard 80 Plus Certified Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready ​

Seems pretty generic, perhaps this is the problem? Although it's been fine since 2017...

Update: I re-created the crash again just now, watching the metrics real-time from AMD's monitoring software, and it ran fine as long as the GPU draw stayed below 100 Watts... it crashed within seconds of hitting 125 Watts.

Start by replacing that PSU