Apex freezing PC on launch

Hi All,

It's rare I reach out for support but I've exhausted everything I can think of...

Apex crashes on launching and freezes my PC, the PC becomes sluggish & unresponsive after the Easy anticheat splash screen gets to 100%. The only way out is to hard reset on the tower. This happens every time I launch the game.

This same thing happened a few weeks back when using Origin, I exhausted all my options again and did a clean windows install. The same thing continued to happen with Origin after the fresh windows install. I downloaded Apex on Steam and it worked 🥳 ... for 3 weeks and now the same is happening with Steam.

Hardware:

6700K

GTX 1080

Asus Maxmimus Hero VIII

16gb RAM

Troubleshooting/ things tried so far:

Running as admin

All overclocking turned off permanently 

Bios updated (and rolled back, then updated again)

GPU drivers updated

Windows updates

Engine management updates

Clean boots

Clearing temp files

verifying game integrity

Repairing Easy anti cheat

Disabling firewalls/ exceptions

No system logs are made of the crash, its like it doesn't register its failed.

Ive played this game on this system for years with no issue and now its like a brick wall! Any help would be appreciated. Anyone experiencing similar?