Question PC Shutting Down

[StealthArsenal]

Good morning everyone,

Apologies for the generic thread topic, at a loss for what to actually title it. In any event, I was helping my mother with an issue on a computer I built her several years ago at this point.

Quick Specs:
- AMD Ryzen 1600X
- Aorus B450 Elite
- 16 gb g skill (flare x I believe)
- Windows 10
- GT 710 video card

She specifically uses this machine for email, bills, youtube, etc. So nothing crazy whatsoever. She has been telling me for a couple of weeks she would get up in the morning go to use her computer, lights would be on, but it would be completely shut down.

The surge protector would need to be reset and start the machine back up. So initially the thought was a bad surge protector, but that turned out to not be the issue. I got a chance to get up to her house the other day (I have been busy with my newborn son) to try and troubleshoot the machine.

What was happening is the machine was just shutting down when doing normal tasks. My first check was for overheating and such and that was fine. I went into event viewer and saw some errors relative to secure boot not being enabled and then warnings for distribution com. Note that by the time I got to see the machine it had shut down on me 4-5 times in the matter of 5 minutes.

I brought it back to my place to trouble shoot. I enabled secure boot in bios with system and standard settings (no custom or setup parameters in the UEFI) and I pushed a regedit for secure boot to 1. System reflects secure boot is now active and it seemed to be running just fine. I did bios update, driver updates, windows updates, etc while I was at it since they were all pretty dated. I ran it for about two days without issue so I brought it back to my moms set it back up.

Ran fine for 12 hours and it shut down again. No Event Codes or BSOD codes other than a critical that the computer shut down unexpectedly. I saw that the regedit didn't hold the secureboot setting at 1 so I manually set that back. Machine seemed to run fine all day yesterday until this morning when it was again off. I remoted into the machine multiple times yesterday putting load on and was rock solid. As I mentioned earlier, the only event viewer mention is distribution com warning (yellow not red warning) and nothing else.

To be clear, I did not do any memtesting or nvme testing as all seemed okay once I got rid of the secure boot errors. What could I be missing here? Short of backing up the machine, wiping it, and installing Windows 11 I am not sure.

Thanks for any thoughts or ideas here before I just move forward with a wipe.

 

[COLGeek]

What is the make/model of the power supply and how old is it?

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

As above, the PSU is likely the culprit. You could also check that all components are firmly in place (take them out and reseat them.

 

[StealthArsenal]

EVGA Supernova 650. Off the top of my head I am not sure which revision it is (P5 being most recent). It's some where in the 3-4 years old. I think I might have a spare supernova sitting in another machine I could pull that is 3 years old itself, but is not used. If it has more than 100 hours on it I would be shocked.

@Roland Of Gilead I did forget to mention I reseated everything. I pulled the gpu, ram sticks, even went as far as to redo thermal paste and checked all psu connections.

That being said, my initial thought was PSU, but the fact that I was able to stop the almost instantaneous shutdowns by just enabling secure boot on the system made me second guess my thoughts.

 

[COLGeek]

Swap the PSU. Try again.

 

[StealthArsenal]

I will give it a whirl and see what happens. Thanks all. I will report back with my findings. Will take a few days for me to get up to swap and test.