Sounds more like something is running that's kicking up the GPU, and then crashing when it's trying to utilize the GPU. Which still could either be software or hardware.
Try booting into Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Networking and see if you crash sitting there in Safe Mode doing something. You could also try, while in Normal mode, disable GPU acceleration within Chrome's advanced settings (all the way at the bottom of the Settings page called "Use hardware acceleration when available").