My computer was stable for a month after installing a new Ryzen 3950x processor. It randomly rebooted a few days ago and it would get stuck in an infinite reboot cycle while trying to boot Windows. It was stable enough to enter the BIOS but it would crash if it tried to boot into Windows. Using a Windows repair disk or even a Linux USB drive saw the same behavior. When I tried to install Linux I saw a brief error message flash before it rebooted, "[Hardware Error]: CPU 6 : Machine Check: 0 Bank 6 :baa0000000"
After a lot of troubleshooting (trying new power supply, memory) the system only boots into Windows after disabling 8 cores (2 CCXs?) in the BIOS. This only gives me 8 cores out of 16. It also didn't boot with 12 cores.
Is my CPU truly defective?