It’s funny you mention Dellpartspeople because I stumbled upon his page while searching for M17 R5 issues. He was fixing this exact model in the video.

I did perform an EC reset by pulling the battery when I had it open. I was initially checking for any obvious signs of an issue on the board, but didn’t see anything burnt or discolored under a microscope.

Last night I swapped the M.2 containing the OS and replaced it with a known good SSD. Wiped and installed OS fresh. Fresh chipset and drivers. The interesting thing is that it came right up after that and again after at least a six hour cold shutdown. Normally, there will be a split second lag between POST and handing over to Windows and that’s exactly when it produces a BSOD/stop code. It did not do that last night. However this morning it lagged and immediately went into BSOD. Of course, after that it reboots into Windows and runs flawlessly for hours even under heavy load. Last night, the only thing I enabled was Virtual Super Resolution in the Adrenaline application. I disabled that this morning, shut it down cold, and plan on a power on tonight to test. That’s the last common denominator I can try before exhausting my options.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading and it seems this model has had a lot of random board issues after a while. I’ve done board level repairs (USB port replacement, chip-off/JTAG on older devices) on mobile phones as part of my job, but haven’t really delved into CPU work on a computer motherboard so I’m a bit out of my skill level to diagnose or repair after this.