AMD Phenom Phantom on Gigabyte Guts with no Glory

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According to documentation, you should just be able to socket replace your AMD Athlon (Socket AM2) with an AMD Phenom. Boot, and watch the bits fly. Well, theoretically.

In my Gigabyte’s case: this was not to be so. The smaller Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H (blah!) is in our Media Center PC. This combination has been working well in production for months.

Continuous beeps (longish) from the Power-on-self-test (POST) indicates either power, memory, motherboard or somesuch failure. The Gigabyte documentation is 7 lines long and 7 pages short on helping.

OK, reading the procedures on forums and stuff.

It’s not the power supply. I can swap out the Phenom and Athlon with the same “everything” and it boots.

The Gigabyte online specifications state that the 9600 Black Edition (BE) is supported with a recent BIOS update. My BIOS has been at this update for the last 2 months in anticipation of the Phenom processor.

In short, wait people. Or at least research a little more than I did. Colleagues report that ASUS motherboards are work OK.

Oh the joys of hardware.

5 thoughts on “AMD Phenom Phantom on Gigabyte Guts with no Glory”

  1. Last year I purchased a Gigabyte motherboard from North Rocks Markets. When I built up the entirely new computer, I had continuous short beeps, a similar sort of problem. I suspected everything, but eventually deduced I had a faulty Mobo. I took the whole PC back to the Asian guy I bought the Mobo from and he said initially “No, no it couldn’t be the motherboard – Gigabyte have been proven to be 99.8 reliable from the factory. It must be the power supply?” Anyway in this case the Mobo was proven faulty and he reluctantly gave me a new one under warranty.

    Anecdotally a guy came in with a suspect faulty power supply and the Asian guy told him “No, no it couldn’t be the power supply; It must be the motherboard”…..

    Tell people what they need to know!

  2. GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H (AM2)

    I had a problem when I was building a computer
    All components where new all cables and drives where install correctly
    When the system was started I just got long beeps continuously
    And no video signal I unplugged all cables and wires and started
    Over again I did this about 3 times, I was ready to Stump on the thing
    Like In Rush Hour 2 when Carter stumped on the gangster boss notebook
    at the sauna. But just before I was ready to stump on the thing I was thinking
    About the ram but I had them in the right slots DDR1 slot and DDR2 slot
    So then I put them in the DDR3 slot and DDR4 slot and bingo the system
    Started right up no problem with video or any thing else. So before you stump
    On your computer or throw it out the window try the ram, try a different slot
    Or make sure the ram is ok or is in the slot correctly. Hope this helps

  3. @codedog

    I love your Rush Hour analogy…

    The Poor Gigabyte has been relegated to a box … but wil probably come back to life with an Althon.

    Nick

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