Any help with the dreaded red light/yellow light?

MPG B850 edge ti wifi (9800x3d, patriot venom 32gb, rog strix 850w plat)

What I've tried..

with cpu and ram, without cpu, with one stick of ram, in each of four slots... and without either (where i currently am)

Every usb key I could find, the first is a 4gb pny stick ive had for like 20yrs, that seemed to be the most successful.. few green flashes x2, mobo lights up.. then nothing.

2x sandisk (32gb and 128 iirc) and a kingston drive... i drove 40km today to pickup the second sandisk which was usb 2.0.. no response.

Formatted with rufus, diskpart, bootice, etcher.. all varying degrees of nothing happening to.. board lights up and.. nothing happens.

Tried fat16, fat32, with mbr, without.. tried creating small partitions with old nt5.0 mbrs etc.

Came across a thread here on reddit where someone said they tried formatting with windows didn't work, so they used their mac disk util to format and it worked flawlessly. I'm not a mac head but use fedora so I figured what the heck.. booted into fedora, flashed drive and tried again..

Well, this time, i thought i hit the nail on the head.. drive is flashing away.. constantly, only now.. the board doesn't light up, so i'm one half of one and not the other.

About to throw the towel in on this one, RMA the board and never buy MSI ever again.