Ready for an interesting story?
CB put the PC together last night. I was there for the build, because I wanted to see AM2. Big deal... and apparently the low-end X2 chips don't come with the AMD heatpipe cooler now? Anyway, we booted the PC, and got 1 long and 2 short beeps. At first it did this no matter what, and this is the same post code that we get when there is no RAM in the machine, so we assumed it was the RAM incompatibility. We finally got it to boot into BIOS with one stick of RAM in the thing.
Once in BIOS, I set the Tras to 15 and the command rate to 2T. I also set the speed to 400MHz. Magically, the rig booted. And we installed Windows. And, as nervous as it made us, we updated the BIOS from the version 0202 that came with the board to version 0304. We also have both sticks of RAM in the machine now.
We thought that would work. It didn't - apparently this BIOS doesn't completely remove the compatibility issues, because turning the speed of the RAM back up to either 667 or 800 (we didn't try 533) the computer will lock up during Windows loading. The problems are at least cleared up to the point where the rig seems completely stable with the RAM at 400MHz, but not at all if we raise the speed to its stock level.
Any ideas? Did we not get the version of the BIOS that clears up the compatibility issue? Is there something else we're missing here?