My PC suddenly shut down, and now it gets stuck on an orange LED when I try to boot (it's an ASUS motherboard, so that indicates a RAM issue). I've tried power cycling multiple times, and sometimes I can get it to reach BIOS or even Windows, but ultimately it reboots and gets stuck on POST again after a short while. My setup is about 1.5 years old, and we've recently experienced several storms with brownouts and power outages. Although I have a surge protector showing it's okay, it's quite old (16 years!), so I ordered a UPS with AVR to better handle those outages. The GPU seems fine and shows normal display when I can boot up. When I leave the PC alone, it just stays on POST indefinitely with the orange error light and all fans running non-stop.
5 Answers
Have you thought about updating the motherboard BIOS? Sometimes those updates can resolve compatibility issues that pop up after hardware has been functioning for a while. If you're unsure how to do it, it might be good to get in touch with customer service.
It sounds like it could be an issue with the RAM. Have you tried testing each stick individually in each slot? Sometimes, a single stick can work better than others during a POST.
Just to clarify regarding the diagnostic LEDs, Asus systems usually have a color coding for their Q-LED. The orange light corresponds to RAM issues. If you think it's the RAM LED, it should be labeled as such, but it's worth checking the manual just to be sure.
Yes, according to the manual: yellow-green is for boot devices, yellow/orange for RAM, red for CPU, and white for VGA. I’ve had this setup running for almost 2 years without issues, so it’s confusing.
It could be that it's not the RAM at all. ASUS boards can be pretty picky with DDR5. I've seen them behave like this while the RAM works perfectly in another motherboard.
If you can get into BIOS, try disabling XMP for the RAM. If you can't access BIOS, you might want to reset it, which will automatically turn off XMP. That might help with booting.
I did test each stick, but I didn't have much luck. I got into BIOS once with one of them, but it wasn't stable enough to run Memtest.