Just using this thread as a diary I guess, I wanted to rule out a bios issue with this 2nd board I am attempting to repair. The qflash seems to work fine on this board but again it just cycles between cpu and dram light. My plan is to start taking parts off the working reference board to see if I can get it to have this same cycling debug light behavior so I started with removing the bios chip to see what the behavior would be. For some reason removing the bios chip and improperly reinstalling (a few pins not being fully soldered) it caused the atx power on pin to be shorted to the power button...

Also on the boards you repaired that had a faulty chipset, did they always show a short somewhere on or near the chipset?...

Thank you so much for the reply. I actually was able to fix this board yesterday. Turns out the board had a bad chipset like you mentioned. A few resistors and test pads near the chip set showed a short so I replaced that and the shorts were gone but I still had the symptoms mentioned above. I gave up on the board until a week ago and decided to swap the sio and I think its called the ecd chip and the bios chip as well which finally resolved the issues.

I have another x870i aorus pro ice that I am working on now, it had the ecd chip improperly removed and had 5 damaged traces, 3...

I have a gigabyte x870i board I am attempting to repair. I have a working board as well to reference. The board is stuck on the dram light, wont post and I found the power good pin has 0 volts when powered on with a stick of ram installed. With out the ram it is 3.3v. Another weird issue with the board is when trying to use qflash to update the bios, the qflash light blinks for about 15 seconds then turns off for 30-45 seconds and then turns back on solid for about 3 minutes. My working reference board will flash the qflash led for about 15 seconds, turn off for a few seconds then turn back on...