I would second Roderick's suggestion...narrow things down to a single active CPU, go from there.
Depending on some of the remaining hardware drivers you may be seeing a lock early on (display showing stuff) but the root cause maybe something else.
As I experimented with getting SMP installed on my AMD Phenom II X6 I found that running more than 5 cores would result in the WPS blue-screen hang, but that was a somewhat well known issue with SNAP video drivers not being quite SMP ready.
For my part I am very curious how you work through this issue, please continue to post updates. The Ryzen CPU is my next upgrade, probably Ryzen2 actually, still some time left.