Question PC sometimes crashes soon after booting

[rush_academic]

Hi,

I built my first PC about a year ago, and for around 9 months it has sometimes been crashing shortly after startup from cold - probably around 30% of the time.
It generally happens a couple of minutes after I log in, usually when opening a programme such as Chrome or Steam. The PC freezes for a few seconds, and then the monitor loses signal but the PC stays on; I have to reboot manually. Very rarely it will reboot itself.
Weirdly, the only thing that makes it guaranteed to crash is if I go into the BIOS and try and change the fan settings on my stock AMD CPU fan.
If I make it past the 5-minute mark the PC is pretty much guaranteed to be fine, and doesn't have any problems with gaming etc. I am running the latest drivers for my GPU and CPU and have updated them several times; none of which have improved this issue. One thing that did help was setting up a password and having to log in rather than the PC going to desktop immediately - this cut down on the issue significantly.

I have disabled quick startup, and my Windows recently did a big update so I'm guessing that the install isn't the problem.
I am using a pretty cheap and sometimes unreliable wifi USB dongle; could this be a problem?

Open to any help on what could be causing this or the best way to go about diagnosing the issue!

AMD Ryzen 5 1600
MSI B450M-A PRO MAX AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard
XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy
2x 8GB RAM (Adata XPG Gammix)
Corsair CV550 550W PSU (I don't overclock)
Seagate Maxtor Z1 240GB SSD
Seagate BarraCuda 1TB HDD

Thanks!

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

We're going to need a little more info. 550W is the wattage of the PSU. Please include the make and model of the unit and it's age. Also, there should be a 4 digit number to denote which Ryzen 5 processor you own. You will also need to parse the make and model of the motherboard as well. Off the top of my head, you're going to need a reliably built PSU that can deliver at least 650W of power to the entire system(anything higher will be headroom for the platform), so wattage wise, you're lacking.

 

[rush_academic]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

We're going to need a little more info. 550W is the wattage of the PSU. Please include the make and model of the unit and it's age. Also, there should be a 4 digit number to denote which Ryzen 5 processor you own. You will also need to parse the make and model of the motherboard as well. Off the top of my head, you're going to need a reliably built PSU that can deliver at least 650W of power to the entire system(anything higher will be headroom for the platform), so wattage wise, you're lacking.

Thank you! And thanks for the advice, I have updated my post with more specific information.

So it sounds like a possible PSU problem then - could it be demanding more power than the PSU can provide soon after startup?