PC Crashes Under Load

JZA · December 10, 2020

Hi All,

I am helping a friend with his PC. Unfortunately he lives in a diferent city so I am trying to help him from afar. The PC was running fine until one day he came home and someone had been sanding plasterboard in the hallway. His computer was running in his room and had sucking in some of the dust (not heaps, just a little bit). Ever since then it crashes under load. It will run all night just idling but shortly after launching a game or trying to install software etc itll crash. There's no BSOD and no errors recorded in the windows relibility monitor other than "Windows crashed unexpectedly" so it somewhat rules out software etc although I did make sure windows and all drivers were up to date.

I dont know the exact specs of his machine but I know:

-i5 4000 series CPU

-GTX 1060

-ASUS motherboard

-16Gb ram

-Brand new Gigabyte P750GM

It's an older machine but it was working fine up until the dust incident.

Steps I have taken so far:

- Instructed him to clean everything out with a can of compressed air

- Fresh install of windows including windows updates and drivers for GPU etc

- We though it might be dust in the PSU so we tried a brand new PSU and the problem persists.

- Checked all PSU connections to motherboard (note all PSU cables were replaced, no old PSU cables are present in the system).

I am going to get him to install HWinfo after work so we can monitor temperatures and see if the CPU or GPU is reaching Tjunction or anything like that. I'll also ask him to give the computer another clean and make sure that all the fans are spinning, not making any funny noises etc.

Does anyone have any tips about software or steps we can take to rule out CPU, GPU, RAM, motherboard?

I have read a bunch of articles and watched a few videos on youtube about similar issues. Some people managed to fix similar issues with a thorough clean while others found that inidividual capacitors on their motherboard were causing the issues. Its a tricky problem, especially since I cant work on the computer myself and I have to instruct him what to do. Any help would be greatly appreciated.