Why the beeps?

[Shadax]

Something in my case is beeping. I can't tell if it's the motherboard or something from one of the bays.

It's one long beep with 2 second or so pauses (continuous). I checked up the beep definitions for the phoenix bios and it says it may be a dram problem. My ram is brand spankin new (Corsair XMS series) and it's little LED's light up as usual and it's in there fine. The video card also seems to be fine and it has adequate power as it's fan turns on and the led's on it light up.

None of this started happening until I installed a 3" Fan controller and a new Thermaltake heatsink and fan (silent tower).

My components:

MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum Skt 939 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 skt 939 processor
1024 MB Ram Corsair XMS Series 184 pin DDR400
ATI Radeon X800 XT GPU
Sound Blaster Audigy ZS 2 Platinum

In the bays:
DVD+/- RW 16x
Floppy and Media reader combo
The sound panel from the sound card
A fan controller

That's just to include the specifics. I've been tinkering with this thing all night and I'm going insane.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated in advance.

 

[Shadax]

I just took everything out including the motherboard (disconnected absolutely everything) and put it all back together. Same thing. Just powers on, everything turns on, fans, harddrives, my lil neon tubes, but one long heartbreaking beep with no video. Silent for a few more seconds then beeps again, and again, and again. It's like I paid a hundred bucks for this to happen (th eprice of the new heatsink, the fan controller, and the dvi cable) and now I can't find one thing that could possibly be wrong. I just don't get it, it was fine before the new heatsink fan and fan controller and now it's just retarded.

It's only my first build so maybe I got lucky when putting it together the first time. What are all the possible things that can be wrong?

 

[mauiblue]

Did you try clearing the CMOS? Some motherboards have a jumper that you use to reset the CMOS. Worth a shot.

Good luck and I know you won't give up.

 

[Shadax]

Another thing I noticed is that it immediately powers on when I flick the PSU switch on the back instead of when I press the power switch in the front.

Anybody have any idea whatsoever?

 

[Shadax]

Originally posted by: mauiblue
Did you try clearing the CMOS? Some motherboards have a jumper that you use to reset the CMOS. Worth a shot.

Good luck and I know you won't give up.

Yes, I shorted pins 2-3 as the motherboard manual describes. I let it sit for about 3 minutes. I switched it back to pins 1-2 and powered on. Same deal.

It's hard not to give up at this point. I just have no idea what's wrong. I'm so pissed because I got Half Life 2 today AND my new heatsink/fan came. I was so happy and I said to myself "I'm gonna give my PC a nice treat of cooling and play HL2 aaaallll night. And now I'm cursing and so dissappointed in myself that I can't fix this.

I really hate to bug the forums, I like to search or just figure it out on my own. But it looks like my precious build will need to be taken to a specialist for something that I know is so small and stupid that I'm just not catching.

Hey thanks tho.

edit: I just realized world of warcraft is out extremely soon. ::holds queezy stomache::

 

[Viper96720]

You need to just use bare minimums. Don't install everything all at once. Have just your cpu, video card and memory and the power button to turn it on. Unless you like shorting the pins or your board has a button on to power up with. If you have multiple ram use just one stick. It maybe your shorting out something. One time I had long beeps I had hooked up my front usb wrong. Knew that was it cause when I disconnected it beeps went away.

 

[CSMR]

It beeps because it's worried the fans are too slow. Not sure what can be done about it.

 

[Shadax]

I doubt it's because of the fans...

 

[Sunbird]

is the heatsink installed properly? can you test the graphics cards in another PC? Is the RAM seated in their slots properly? Got the heatsink wires connected to the right header on the motherboard?

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Shadax
I doubt it's because of the fans...

Plug your old, fast load fan into the the CPU header and try powering up. (You can plug the mounted fan into another header for the time being). If it powers up, try and find and disable the option for rpm sensing shutdown in the bios.

I had this happen on an old abit board, its a safety feature that does not take into account fans less than a certain amount of rpms.

It could also be plenty of other things, but it only takes a second to check this!

 

[ThePiston]

see if your BIOS has some weird alarms and turn them off (if you know why they're beeping)

 

[Thegonagle]

Originally posted by: Shadax
I doubt it's because of the fans...

Why is that? The fans are what you've changed from your previous configuration.

I agree that the motherboard probably isn't booting because it thinks the CPU fan is either spinning too slowly, not spinning at all, or missing.

I had a POS Abit something or other, a really popular one, maybe IS7, but it would give me all sorts of problems with the monitors; beeping while it was running, shutting down, and occasionally not booting up, all for no good reason--it wasn't overheating or anything, but I did put a Fan-Mate on that ridiculous 6000 RPM northbridge fan, and I was using a fairly low-speed 92mm fan on the CPU heatsink. That Abit could not respect my wishes for the system to STFU. Maybe your MSI has similar issues.

I think I still have that Abit--sitting unused in my closet. I should try to sell it, but I'm afraid it will come back and bite me in the ass if I do. I'll be sticking with (and paying the premium price for) Asus for awhile longer.