Built a custom PC a month or two ago. It ran well for a while but crashed mid-game a few weeks afterwards. I think I heard a pop when it crashed, but it was a while ago and I'm not 100% certain.
Components:
* MSI Tomahawk B350 motherboard
* Corsair Vengeance RAM (don't remember clockspeed at the moment, don't think it's relevant here)
* ASUS STRIX GTX 1080
* Ryzen 1600X
* Samsung 960 Evo 500 GB
* Windows 10
The behavior right now is that I can successfully boot into BIOS, but when I try booting into an actual OS it does begin to boot, but quickly crashes. When it crashes the CPU undetectable debug light on the motherboard comes on, and the graphics card starts flashing angry colors, and of course I lose graphics.
I have tried a bunch of things:
* Replaced the graphics card, no change
* Boot off of Ubuntu-flashed flash drive, no change (still crash after POST)
* Removed each of my two sticks of RAM separately, no change
* A friend (with more computer-building experience than myself) messed with the CPU voltage through BIOS. When he lowered it, Windows didn't crash, but instead tried to run repair or whatever, and just hung there till we shut it down. He then tried lowering the CPU clock-speed (I think, it may have been a different clock-speed, this was a little while ago) and then it wouldn't even POST. After that we removed and replaced the motherboard battery and it now boots to the windows repair loading screen before crashing the same way it did originally
It seems pretty clear that it has to be the CPU, but I'm wondering why it would even start to boot if that were the case. Also why it crashed when it did. Nothing gets overly hot when I run it, I have a high-quality CPU cooler which I'm 99% sure I installed correctly, and the computer ran for a couple weeks including some long gaming sessions with no trouble before dying.
