On older Asus mobos, PLED1 is just a power LED. I would expect it to be in series with the ancient chassis PLED1 pin, they should both light up whenever the mobo is powered on. (Actual power LED, not standby power LED.)
But on the R5E it's physically adjacent to the VRM bank which services the LGA2011-3 socket. I suspect it's an onboard VRM status indicator meant to light up when the mobo is attached to Asus factory diagnostic gear. A conspicuous lack of any public documentation suggests it's not intended to assist end-users with troubleshooting. The SMT LED traces attach to a zener on the VRM side and ultimately feed (through some passives) to the magical black box ROG chip - they clearly won't light up unless a certain voltage threshold is met and a secret ROG signal is sent, so methinks PLED1 is probably meant to indicate (to a qualified Asus technician, of course) that one of the VRM components has flagged a fail condition of some sort. "DIGI+ VRM" is just fancy marketing of PWM-controlled variable voltage regulators, it all boils down to whatever firmware and PWM capabilities are running in the ROG chip (fancy Asus marketing name for embedded ASIC microcontroller).
I've yanked my ROG chips out and plugged my JTAG in, the ROG parts are of course unmarked proprietary codelocked stuff without datasheets but it's just a matter of time before I can duplicate their functions with a more robust programmable microcontroller part and, incidentally, figure out what undocumented components like PLED1 are meant to really do.
First guess is that it's showing a main VRM failure, the 8-phase DIGI+ VRM is really one digital controller running a gang of eight discrete voltage regulators wired in parallel, and any imbalance or failure in one or more of those VRM parts will put a heavier load on the other VRM parts (which can really yank them all around if one part is oscillating or has intermittent thermal failure or overcurrent runaway or something) - which throws the entire output voltage (as seen by the controller) entirely out of skew in all sorts of bad ways. Meaning that your mobo is not sensing correct voltages and is working with incorrect voltages, meaning that even if it is working within correct voltages they might momentarily surge and waver out of tolerance and bombard some or all of your poor little CPU pins with all sorts of half-uncontrolled power spikes. Hope you can RMA that mobo before you burn another CPU, cooked silicon is an ugly smell. Everything *everything* on this mobo is digitally controlled except for things like that little zener diode which is physically wired to sense an analog voltage threshold, so if PLED1 is lit then either that zener is bad or all the onboard digital information is bad - I'm inclined to say the zener is properly calibrated because if it wasn't then it could falsely light the LED but no way could it cook your processor socket.
And the sad thing here is that you've lost a killer $1000 CPU and $500 motherboard most probably because a $0.25 electrolytic failed to halt a $3 VRM from oscillating out of calibration.
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