Help needed - continuous beeping from asus A8N sli

Hodders · 24 Feb 2006 at 19:42

for the last 6 months my rig has been rock solid.

Recently my pc has started to fail to 'restart' it will still boot fine if it gets turned on from being unplugged.

Except for about one time in 10 when it simply fails to display a video signal and just produces short beeps continuously.

Whilst Ive also had some BSODs it must be a hardware issue due to the power on issues.

Ive run memtest for 12 hours with no problems so it must be either:

a) video - nvidia 7800gt
b) mobo - asus a8n-sli (the one with the heat pipe)
c) cpu amd 3800x2 dual core

The big question is what does the beeping mean ?

I plan to reseat all the major components but what else can I try ?

Many thanks.

StarShock · 24 Feb 2006 at 19:54

edit - sorry, ignor me just got back from 12 hour work day

reedit - have done some checking and aparrently constant random beeping means that the system can't find any memory and that its most likley the mobo it's self thats buggered.

the only offical beep codes are 1 long 2 short meaning video error and any other meaning RAM

Hodders · 25 Feb 2006 at 10:00

thanks StarShock

I plan to do the standard 'take everything out and put it back in bit by bit' thing'. I'll start with the ram - it will be interesting to see if haling no ram results in the continous beeping.

Any other ideas ?

Hodders · 26 Feb 2006 at 15:32

As another thought. All the bits for this PC were bought from OcUK last October. Obviously they are still under warrenty - BUT which bit is faulty ? Any ideas how I can work it out. My brother has an AMD 64bit PC in Bristol but that is a bit of a trek.

Can anyone think of any tests I can do with just the one PC ?

Cheers !

iraiguana · 26 Feb 2006 at 16:28

well u can take everything out then put in cpu, and memory see if it beeps. if not then its the graphics "probably" but easiest way is to exchange it with parts one at a time with a machine that you know is working.

ACPCUP · 26 Feb 2006 at 17:58

Is the Graphics card seated firmly?

MAllen · 26 Feb 2006 at 18:06

Do you have an old video card? Could try this out to eliminate the video as problem.

What about a different PSU? I have seen PSUs start to fail giving weird results.

I have found a funny reason for beeping at startup that I had never seen before. Last week I was working on a customer's Packard Hell PC. I was doing this in my house, where the only heating is a gas fire. This means it can be cold in the mornings. And the Packard Hell would complain bitterly.... beeping like mad until it had warmed up. The PC would start so cold that I could boot into XP and back out, and then when the BIOS was inspected the P4 CPU was still at 9 degrees Celcius!!

Hodders · 26 Feb 2006 at 18:14

First of all - thanks to all the above who have offered help and advice. It is always usefull to get as many thoughts as possible.

I have had some time to try to investigate the fault...

First of all I tried to get the beeping every time I booted the PC. Tried:

1) No ram
2) No video
3) No CPU

None of the above gave the beeping I had heard. 1 and 2 gave beep codes Ie 1 long and 3 short sort of thing. 3 gave no beeps at all.

So I then put it all together again. And so far touch wood it has all been fine restarted about 10 times with no problems at all.

The only thing it could have been is a mis-seated component - obviously testing 1,2 and 3 above will have meant all have been reseated. So touch wood it's fixed.....

I'll run a system burn in over night and see how it goes.

Once again thanks !