Rampage V Extreme stuck at Ad

[Artureld]

Hello All,

I’ve had this issue which has been annoying to say the least. So my PC was working perfectly fine, went down to make coffee came back and it was stuck on a black screen and what I reckon was some issue going into standby. Fair enough I reboot it and lo and behold it won’t load Windows anymore. Q-code is stuck on Ad and if I reset it goes to Fb and no windows loading or anything.*

The boot process goes as normal and then when the handoff needs to occur where windows 10 pro starts loading and the boot activity diode blinks incessantly. It just flickers twice and nothing happens. I’ve pretty much exhausted all options at this stage.
*
I’ve tried the following in no particular order:

Bios update to 4104
CMOS reset
Switching BIOS
Disconnecting all the SATA cables to rule out a bad SSD.
Removing the M.2 and reinstalling it.
Removing the M.2 drive entirely
Trying to boot off the media creation USB stick with just the M.2 drive and without it.
Removing all USB cables including those that are apart of the monitor hub.
Disabling CMS.
Toggling Fast Boot to off.
Re-flashing the BIOS*

At this stage I can’t think of anything else. Everything is being detected in the BIOS. The PC starts just fine but it just won’t start loading in Windows, even via USB stick (media creation tool)

I’d really appreciate help, I’ve been holding off upgrading thanks to all this great competition in play from AMD but if this is something hardware related then I might need to bite the bullet and upgrade earlier than I had wanted.

Thought I’d ask the community if they had any tips or suggestions because I couldn’t find anything that rectified the problem.*

[Artureld]

Thank you for the suggestion Athalayogi and yes davemon50, R5E has the option to disable cores. Just tried it and apparently Core 0 didn't load windows but using Core 1 and it loaded into Windows. Guess that sums that up. Processor is the issue. Sigh.

Now the debate of upgrading earlier than expected with Threadripper 3 and a 3970X, was hoping to do that in the summer, or just getting another processor off from eBay and make do, even go upto a 6950X. This is the first time a processor has died on me.

[Artureld]

So just tried disabling cores. Apparently Core 0 seems to be the issue. I went into bios and went step by step turning on each core to check if there were any more and 7 cores and it boots each time to Windows. Very strange wonder if anyone has insights into what went wrong or happened that one core seems to be dead.

[davemon50]

I have no insights on single core problems but at least you isolated the issue. If you don't run a whole lot of multi-core software you might never see an impact. On the other hand it might mean the rest of the unit is ready to die too, and you could lose something. I use the 6950X in my rig, it's a nice CPU.