Continuous Beeps Upon Starting New PC

[tooslim]

Last night I placed the last piece of hardware in the system I have been building and rechecked everything. I pressed the power button and was right away greeted with what sounds just like a telephone ringing, it goes for about 2 seconds and then there is a pause, the the ringing sound starts again, only this time it does not stop. I've let it go for as long as 10 minutes before shutting the PC down. Needless to say I am literally sick to my stomach.

My motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-8INXP uses an Award BIOS. According to other posts on other forums this long ringing sound is actually a series of short beeps running constantly. It is supposed to indicate a memory problem, other posts state it can also be a video or cpu problem. I have no idea and was hoping someone here might know?

I will say that after carefully reviewing my parts that I may have made one mistake on my RAM. My board supports PC2100 DDR RAM, either unbuffered or the ECC type. What I bought was PC2100 Registered ECC RAM and I don't know if the registered part of my RAm is what could be causing the problem?

Along with this problem there is no video signal, my monitor light blinks on and off but the screen is black.

The mouse is an optical type and the light underneath is lite.

The keyboard does not seem to be working, I mean there is no CAPS lock light.

The case, cpu, hdd, and video card fans all work.

I am at a lose as to what to do. If anyone could help I would be very appreciative.

Thank you.

 

[Boonesmi]

the rapid constant beeping usually means a memory error

and your registered ram is probably the problem (registered ram is usually only supported in sever motherboards) most desktop/workstation boards require unbuffered, non paritiy (not registered, ecc)


just as a side note unbuffered is the opposite of registered, and non parity is the opposite of ecc

 

[tooslim]

Thanks for the help. Your right, I took the PC to my local PC shop and sure enough I bought the wrong type RAM. My boards manual says it supports ECC RAM but I bought Registered ECC RAM. I'm building this PC as a learning experience and this was an expensive leason. $211 to be exact, plus the new RAM I bought yesterday.

Thanks for your help, you are right on.

 

[Boonesmi]

glad you got it fixed
is your new ram ecc also? the board only supports unbuffered ram, but it can take either ecc or non-ecc (non-parity)

and unbuffered, non-parity is the least expensive and works just as well plus you can get a 512mb stick of pc3200 for around $80

 

[tooslim]

This time I went through the various RAM sellers websites and found that Crucial had a RAM selector that garenteed if you buy the RAM on recommendation of their selector it will work or they will replace it.

In any case your right, unbuffered or ECC will work just not Regestered ECC.

 

[Boonesmi]

if you used the crucial ram selector then it probably just gave you some unbuffered non-parity ram (which is fine)