Before I put in a support ticket and probably get an answer involving a long RMA process I'd like to see if anyone else could shed some light on this.
Got my 7300 on 1/26 and it was working fine. I didn't re-image it, just left whatever stock Windows install on there and updated it. I was going to but noticed that it came with 0 bloatware so I figured it's fine. I didn't touch the BIOS either. I just jumped in and tried throwing every game at it and everything ran like a dream. No problems. A couple weeks later I started getting random BSODs, whether inside a game or watching a video or just idling. IRQL_less_not_equal mostly but also system_service_exception, page_fault_in_nonpaged_area, etc.
Going through the dump files it was a ntoskernel.sys problem every time, except once in a blue moon it was something else as well. I can't access those dumps anymore as my PC now won't even POST or get to BIOS. No troubleshooting seemed to work. Sometimes it'd go 2 or 3 days without BSOD, sometimes I couldn't start a game for more than 2 minutes.
Yesterday I received 3-4 BSODs in a row while trying to play a game (after having 0 issues all day long) so I decided to just try reinstalling Windows but I never got that far. I manually rebooted to install from a Windows 11 flash drive I already had made, and then I received a reference_by_pointer BSOD when I clicked "restart". Now the following happens:
Video card and peripheral lights turn on including RAM, fans spin, but the motherboard debug light for CPU stays red, never gets to BIOS. For reference, normally any time I restart or turn off/on the PC, the red CPU light on the motherboard would be on as soon as the power button was pushed, then turn off as the BIOS screen came up. It's 100% verified that the computer isn't booting and not just "booting but I can't see it because my monitor is off" or whatever. It straight up is not getting to BIOS or POST. Nothing was changed in my BIOS before boot failure. Prior to boot failure I'd recovered from a few BSODs but nothing was changed on the system.
I've tried the following to fix the booting issue.
Powering completely off, unplugging, holding down power button for 30 seconds to discharge anything, and leaving powered off overnight
Reseating RAM
Trying a different power cable/outlet
Making sure power cables on mobo/GPU/etc. are secure and tight
I'm not at the computer at the moment but I'm hoping someone might have some ideas or see something that I'm not seeing. I just have no idea why BIOS won't even show. Could the CPU actually just be faulty?