My motherboard beeps

[fire]

I just installed a new Asus A8V-MX motherboard with an Athlon 64 3500+ boxed CPU. There are 512MB PC-2700 DDR RAM. I have a 200MB Seagate internal hard drive and an 802.11b PCI card installed in the system as well. A Samsung LCD is attached to the on-board VGA port.

On bootup, I get this beep pattern: one long, two short (beeeeeep, beep beep). No output on the monitor is seen.

Google tells me this beep pattern signifies video failure. But I don't have a video card installed at the moment. I tried installing an AGP graphics card and using the monitor with that, but that did not work either.

Any hints? I posted on the VIP Asus forums but I've had 8 views, all of them mine, I think.

[Kevin J Baird]

Internal video card on the motherboard?

K

[Rob Beschizza]

If you can find a phone number, call it. That's usually the magic solution -- sometimes you can even get a replacement offered on the spot if they think the board might be defective.

The key, I think, is to give yourself a set number of hours to figure out the problem and promise yourself that if you dont solve it, you'll just send it back whence it came and get a replacement sent.

First step, however, is to remove everything except your cpu and ram, and see what happens when you power on. Unplug the monitor from the onboard, even, unplug all USB and Ps/2 devices, including such things as USB-headers-to-front-of-case. Not even a hard drive. Start at the start.

[EvilIdler]

1 long, 2 short is video card error. That mobo has internal graphics,
so it uses part of system RAM for graphics memory (most likely).
Your memory is rated for 166MHz (333MHz DDR), which doesn't really
match your CPU. I wouldn't expect an Athlon 64 to even co-exist with
anything less than PC3200, but I dunno anything about what that chipset
can do ;)

If you can, borrow some PC3200 memory and boot up the computer
with ONLY that, drives and everything else disconnected.

[fire]

I was worried about that! I'm still waiting for my PC3200 RAM to come in, so I borrowed some PC2700 for now. We'll see if the problem goes away with faster RAM. Thanks, Evil.

[Rob Beschizza]

1 long, 2 short is video card error. That mobo has internal graphics,
so it uses part of system RAM for graphics memory (most likely).
Your memory is rated for 166MHz (333MHz DDR), which doesn't really
match your CPU. I wouldn't expect an Athlon 64 to even co-exist with
anything less than PC3200, but I dunno anything about what that chipset
can do ;)

If you can, borrow some PC3200 memory and boot up the computer
with ONLY that, drives and everything else disconnected.

I'm pretty sure I'm using some old 2100 crap in my computer (A 64 3700, Epox Nforce3 socket 754)

[EvilIdler]

[I'm pretty sure I'm using some old 2100 crap in my computer (A 64 3700, Epox Nforce3 socket 754)

Yeah, it could work, depending on chipsets and stuff. I prefer to match the
CPU and memory, though, because of too many bad incidents ;)