Rampage Maximus X Formula, was running mostly idle, Windows 10 64 Pro. Some Chrome surfing was going on, not much more.
About an hour before the event, Windows 10 popped up a notification about an update being ready, which was ignored on purpose (it downloads and applies itself usually, unfortunately).
At one moment, all out of sudden, the machine hard shut down; like power had been cut. I initially thought that was what happened, but nothing else lost power and UPS was running as usual.
I then proceeded to boot it back, which then lead me to the strange behavior: the machine does not boot at all; it gets power, rolls to Q-CODE 14 and immediately shuts down to start again. The full loop is about 1 second long - QC 14, power off, 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off, 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off , 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off , 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off , 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off , 1/2 second pause, power on, QC 14, power off ....

It goes on forever.

I've shut the thing down, disconnected the power cord, reconnected in an hour, reset CMOS. Same thing.

Shut down, prepared the USB for BIOS flashback, pressed the button for 3s, it flashes five times, then the button blue light was stuck lit forever.

Repeated the process. Same outcome.

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I'd guess the board is dead. I've heard it might be Windows messing up the UEFI with their updates, but that sounds far stretched. The CPU was not under any kind of load, RAM neither, same the GPU.

Since the startup process does not get far at all (Q-CODE 14 is "Pre-memory CPU initialization is started") I suspect it's the CPU that died or the board.
But, I think it's the board, since CPU errors are usually Q-CODEs 5x or Dx as per the manual; D0 or 58 being CPU initialization errors.

Can anyone from Asus or community suggest a possible problem, solution or test? I don't have easily accessible Gen 8 CPU so if not, I'll RMA the board and the CPU for the replacement instead.

Thank you.