While setting up my new rig I ran into an unfortunate problem with the Gigabyte P55M-UD2 motherboard. All my attempts to boot were greeted by a rapid fire beeping sound from the motherboard (short beeps). There were four motherboard lights that lit up green green orange red. After some googling I found that the lights have nothing to do with boot error codes and everything to do with reporting how much power the mobo is currently drawing. I know for a fact that Dell uses a four light system and some other motherboard manufacturers also use it to report boot errors. Gigabyte gets some demerits for implementing a “nice thought” feature that is a red herring.
So how do you fix the rapid fire beeping problem? I tried the usual stuff first. No case, one stick of memory in first slot, video card and processor. Next up came the manual and continuous short beeps indicate a video card error. Three video cards later I determined that was not the case. So I start systematically eliminating problems. Swap memory sticks, swap psu’s, swap cpu coolers, swap video cards…. ack. Back to my friend Google and I finally determine that memory errors cause the problem. That’s funny because there is a beep code for memory errors and it sure isn’t rapid fire beeping! I was using certified memory and it was erroring. No problem, swap sticks. No dice. It turns out you have to boot with the single stick of memory in the second slot. Ai yai yai. Seriously? This motherboard wasted a good two hours of my time as I systematically pulled every component of my system apart trying to identify the error.
For those interested I was running the 1.0 version of the board and it had the F3 BIOS installed.
Update 02/15/10 – It appears that people are hitting this article fairly frequently while searching for beep codes. So hear is the full list.
Thanks for this – I was having the exact same issue. After reading your post I moved the RAM around and the issue was solved. Re-checking the manual, I see that they explain this on page 16. Even so, I’m rarely the type to RTFM.
I am glad to have helped someone out and also glad that someone actually reads my posts!
Thanks, I am gonna try this now. The other day I wanted to dust my rig and I noticed one of my ram sticks was inserted inproperly; i.e. not locked in placed. So I took it out and reinserted it, locked it. 3 short beeps… Google it and found out it was a Memory problem as you say, so I took out my sticks dusted em, and their ports… Try again, rapid fire beeps. So I guess I’ll try booting with one stick, in either port and whatever. If it does not work, I’ll post a question, if it does then thanks a mill.
Peace,
Jimmy B. (No not Jim Beam ^.^)
That iingsht would have saved us a lot of effort early on.
Hi Tom,
I am off to the PC geek tomorrow, cant get a fix. Tried you suggestion, inside and outside of chassis, singles, twos, fours, all slot combinations. Other sites are saying memory incompatabilty. Frustratingly, they had sucess with the memory I am failing with.
P55M-UD2 ver 1.1
Corsair CMS4GX3M1A1333C9
Intel Core i5
thank you… your post saved me hours of screwing around… guys like you make the world go ’round
cheers
bruce c