Windows 10: Computer running up to date Win 10 keeps crashing and rebooting into the bios

Computer running up to date Win 10 keeps crashing and rebooting into the bios. It just started doing this yesterday evening. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

:)

 

access BIOS settings in Win 10

I have an 8-year old computer running Win 10. I need to access the BIOS settings. It used to be the holding down the F2 key during startup would bring up the BIOS screen in Windows computers. But this no longer works. A web article listed a complicated
series of steps leading to a reboot . . . but still no access to BIOS. Any suggestions?

 

Windows 10 keeps crashing

Hi,

There are many possible reasons why the computer will keeps on crashing. One of which is missing or corrupted system files. For us to further isolate the issue, we suggest answering the following questions:

• What exactly are you accessing/doing when the computer crashes?
• Were you still able to login to the computer after it happens?
• Can you send us a screenshot of the error messages or mini dump that you've received?

In the meantime, if you're seeing a blue screen when the computer crashes, we suggest following the steps on this article:
Troubleshoot blue screen errors. Kindly choose the appropriate answer to the category
"When did you get the error?".

We'll wait for your response on this matter.

 

Repeated Crash-rebooting on Windows 10 - what hardware is at fault?

Brief overview
About a couple weeks ago, my custom-desktop (built 2015) started hard crashing and auto-rebooting. The computer has crashed so many times at this point that I can barely keep track (like 50 times in 2 weeks). When I start it up in the morning, it works fine for a few hours, then it will suddenly crash, reboot, and then wait 5-10 min before crashing again and starts to enter the death-spiral of repeated crashes that become increasingly more frequent. Last time this happened (yesterday), it couldn't even get past the BIOS splash screen before another crash. Seems like a short circuit? I have tried a lot of troubleshooting steps so-far, and will list that out in detail below - but for those TL;DR, I am 98% sure it is hardware related, the question is, how to isolate what piece of hardware is at fault? How to test? motherboard or power supply or something else?

Computer Specs:

PS: EVGA 750W GOLD Power Supply

MB: Asus Z170-A, running American Megatrends BIOS 3802 3/5/2018 (UEFI)

CPU: Intel i5-6600K Skylake CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3504 Mhz

GPU: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

Troubleshooting steps taken thus far:

1. I dis-enabled auto-reboot (per suggestions online), and then when machine crashed again, it automatically rebooted, which clearly seems to indicate that the problem is not triggered by Windows.
   
2. I checked the Windows Event Viewer, and here is what it looked like:
   Kernel-Power Event log
   There is no detail available beyond this event ID, because the machine apparently doesn't have a chance to write a dump file prior to crashing, which strongly suggests that it is a hardware problem. The crashes happened several times with no software running, so that confirms that hardware is likely suspect
   
3. I opened up machine and thoroughly cleaned it and checked pin connections between power supply and the motherboard. I re-seated these connections, and it seemed to stop the crashes for 5-6 days, but then it started happening again.
   
4. I updated BIOS to most current build available
   
5. I installed a CPU temperature reading program to see if the i5-6600K is overheating. Here is a normal read-out (cold start)
   CPU Temp cold start
   followed by a read-out I was able to capture shortly after a crash. I don't know about you, but 57°C seems awfully hot for a processor. Makes me start to think that the processor is overheating? Which gets to the next thing
   CPU Temp after crash
   
6. I have tried tweaking the BIOS to disenable overclocking but I am thus far unsuccessful - I don't know why the ASUS Z170-A motherboard is so hard to throttle down, the 'EZ menu' doesn't provide an easy option to just shut it off, and in Advanced mode, even with most settings in the 'AI Tweaker' panel disenabled, it still overclocks. Still looking for a good guide out there that can show me how to do this.
   

Can you provide any insight? I am at my wits end