Ok geeks.. need some help again

Soreali · Post by **Soreali** » March 27, 2007, 1:15 am

Heres the rundown..

Friend of mine has a dell dimensions 4400 PC (1.8GhZ) (yes..i know...PoS...)

Looks like he might have a dead motherboard but wanted to see if I can confirm it here..

The general problem is his PC will boot up but no display will come up and he gets 3 Bios beeps.. he has the A B C D Leds on the back of the PC.. lights A B are amber lights C D are green.. the original problem was CMOS display type wrong.. tried having him take the cmos batery out to reset them but no success..still beeps.. I've had him disconnect everything including removing the ram, still gets 3 beeps..

I've looked about everywhere I can online to see if I can get an answer to what the three beeps mean but haven't found anything yet.

Is it a dead motherboard?

Thanks as always guys.

noel · Post by **noel** » March 27, 2007, 2:00 am

At a minimum, you need RAM and a video card. I can't remember what three beeps is as it's been quite a while but...

Try swapping RAM and Video card until it works.

Marbus · Post by **Marbus** » March 27, 2007, 2:36 am

Problem is that I'm pretty sure that system takes RDRAM which is almost non existent. You could try removing one stick at a time etc... though. However you should be able to try the video card.

If it's blown though, don't worry about replacing it. My suggestion, if your friend isn't wanting to invest a ton of money is to go to the Dell Outlet store on their site and surf (refresh) and watch for a while during the day. I picked up a Dell E521 Athlon X2-3800+ (dual core) with 1GB of RAM, 160GB HD, DVD Burner, Media reader, and GeForce 7100 (keyboard and mouse too) for $330 on the Outlet a few weeks ago. Don't get the scratch and dent, just the certified referb (comes with a year warranty). Everyone I know who works at Dell buys a lot of their PCs there as well (they clued me on to it). They will only let you keep a PC in your cart for 15 min if you don't buy it and the great deals pop up and off quickly so if you don't see a great deal, wait around or check it for a few days.

The PS won't let you run an 8800 GTX or anything but it will run a 7600 GT just fine which will handle almost any game out there and can be picked up on NewEgg for about $100. I grabbed it because even using a bunch of components I already had it was going to cost more than that to build one. The board on the 521s are socket AM2 so they will ramp up if you want a faster processor later. It ships with fairly slow RAM but I'm using mine for the kids and it smokes for them. The board should support DDR2-800 or at least 667 if you want to put it in there as it's an NForce 4 Chipset from NVidia (ships with DDR2-533). Came with Vista which I wiped and put XP back on. A 3800+ running XP is a very good system right now and you can't beat $350 or less.

Note that a lot of the Intel systems aren't that cheap on the outlet, Dell must be getting some really good deals from AMD though. Saw a 3200+ for $250. Just make sure you get a E521 so that you can upgrade the video etc... The other thing about them is they are pretty much silent while running, totally silent compared to my OC'ed E6400 and 8800 GTS, lol... and except for very high end games, there is very little speed differece in day to day tasks with the dual core Athlon.

Cheers!
Marb

Kilmoll the Sexy · Post by **Kilmoll the Sexy** » March 27, 2007, 9:06 am

That light/beep code for the Dimension 4400 is a RAM issue. The light code is "Memory failed to be sized or enabled". The beep code is "failure occurred in the first 64 KB of memory". I would check the BIOS if you can get there and reset it to defaults. Try different sticks of RAM if available. Dell has had trouble with system boards having bad RAM slots.....so if new RAM does not recognize then the board would need replaced.

Soreali · Post by **Soreali** » March 27, 2007, 11:19 am

I had him remove the remove the ram and reboot the PC with the same results.. He has an on-board video card so I was thinking that could be the issue.

noel · Post by **noel** » March 27, 2007, 11:20 am

You can't do shit with no RAM in the system. You have to swap it to some other RAM. Nothing will happen with no RAM in the system. It will not boot and it will give you some complaint.

Traz-KOE · Post by **Traz-KOE** » March 27, 2007, 6:13 pm

Generally speaking, a three beep code in POST is a failure to initialize the RAM. Try swapping it for another stick; if that doesn't work then you most likely need to replace the mobo.