Windows 10: PC suddenly starting to have issues - BSOD/randomly crashing and restarting

Earlier today, and out of nowhere, my PC crashed and after 5 hours of attempting to fix the constant cycle of BSOD I had to perform a reset. Now, it works fine for the most part but as soon as I put any strain on it whatsoever ie. load a game, it crashes without warning.

:)

 

Suddenly - BSOD! x124, ntoskrnl.exe

I'm suddenly getting BSODs. I never see them happen, I always go to my computer and Windows oh so prolifically informs me of a crash. I don't know what triggers it, I'm not there... all I know is it likes to randomly crash. I do run BOINC full-time on the system so there's plenty of load on the CPU and whatnot, but I have before and never had issues until just lately.

(( One major pet peeve about Windows 8... previous versions would give you some info, now I get these *Frown ... ))

Bluescreenview tells me that it's the classic x124 code, and its caused by ntoskrnl.exe. At first I thought that it might be caused by my sound card, a Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro. The reason I thought this is because I never really had any BSOD before I put this card in, where before I used an Asus Xonar DG. I initially blamed Creative's drivers or something along those lines, but since it says the kernel is crashing, I'm thinking maybe Creative isn't at fault here with shoddy drivers. Is my OC suddenly unstable? One line of thought that suggests some form of hardware instability here is that the Asus Xonar DG was a PCI card, and the X-Fi I am using now is PCI-E x1. Maybe having my sound card on the PCI-E bus is stressing out the system more than it was before causing BSOD?

 

Random restarts

when you start the computer up press F8 repeatedly until you get a list of how to start windows, choose do not automatically restart on system failure. if your getting bsod's list what your getting here so we can further help you. IF the system is not getting bsod's and still restarting as you say then i would look into getting a line conditioner for your computer as you might be having power issues.

 

PC reboots (no BSOD) on CPU stress

Hi fellow TPU members,

not too long ago, the box my gf's PC was transported in gave way on the stairs. Yes, you got it right, that sent a PC tumbling down a flight of steps alright.

Stuff broke. Also, stuff remained intact somehow.

I bought her a new case, new CPU cooler and we removed the floppy drive, so far so good. But the PC started crashing for no apparent reason, without a BSOD.

I tested:

• Memtest86+, left overnight, 0 errors
• Scanned the HDD for errors, nothing there
• Left FurMark burning up the GFX card and drawing some power, no problems there
• Ran Ubuntu from a Live CD doing nothing special, didn't crash
• Ran OCCT, Linpack, Prime95, all 3 caused reboots within minutes
• Oh, and I disabled "Restart on error" so I'm sure it's not a BSOD.

Now, I can still try and test something CPU intensive on Ubuntu, but my guess is the CPU didn't survive.
Before I do anything drastic like whippin' out the magic wallet and get her a new AMD quad, is there anything I didn't see?
I'm guessing the motherboard could be borkered as well, but can I check that other than replacing the CPU with a working one?
Any suggestions on which proggies I can use from an Ubuntu Live CD to stress the CPU?