Asus P9X79 four short beeps

It began happening a few weeks ago -- I'd try to boot but before post
I'd hear four short beeps followed by the post chirp (different sound)
and then nothing. But it was an intermittent problem and I let it go
when rebooting seemed to solve things.

Then yesterday the problem stuck around through several attempted
reboots and I figured I'd better do something. So I looked up the error
beep table on the Asus website and found nothing about four short beeps.
Thanks, Asus. Then I branched out and learned Asus uses American
Megatrends' AMI BIOS, and that four beeps mean System Timer Failure,
which further means something's wrong with memory.

That was when I actually looked at BIOS to see how much memory I had and
I learned my four 8-gig memory sticks were producing not 32 gigs of
memory, but just 8 and change. In other words, only one stick was working.

So just now I removed all the memory and began replacing sticks one at a
time. At first I couldn't get past the four beeps, but I kept replacing
sticks in the D1 slot until one worked. (The manual says to put a
single stick in D1.) Then I put a stick in B1 as shown in the manual and
went right back to the four error beeps.

But I persevered, removing and re-inserting, and eventually I had two
working, then four, and now I'm booting nicely and BIOS shows total
memory at 32 gigs and change.

Funny things was -- the AIDA 64 Extreme system monitor software always
showed four slots filled with 8-gig sticks. It saw them when BIOS
didn't. Weird.

But things are fine now. I think. Maybe I oughta run Memtest just to be
sure...

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog