I have an older AM4 system (MSI) that has gradually become unusable.
It can run for a few minutes, sometimes an hour, before a total freeze. This doesn’t depend on load, it could run games for hours and freeze on an empty desktop. System minidumps trace to generic core drivers.
I’ve removed all the drives, reset BIOS, installed W11 on a new drive with no profile and separately tried to boot live Linux, which won’t boot (it does on other machines).
Strangely, the system still runs Windows 11 safe mode for unlimited time. I also tried disabling every optional feature, network and audio in BIOS, in case one of them has a failure, but normal mode still fails in minutes.
Short of separately replacing them, is there any way to narrow the issue down to motherboard vs CPU vs something else? What could be the fundamental difference that lets it run fine in safe mode, but not normal?
If software, what could cause it to fail after several years of smooth operation, both on fresh and old OS?
