Problems with BIOS Beeps During POST

[Mr. Fox]

I have had CF and SLI bridge cables come loose more than once and never experienced a problem booting or having beep codes. If there is a bad connection, I have experienced screen artifacts and distortion. If the bridge cable comes completely loose, everything works fine except CF or SLI is inactive and cannot be enabled. However, I have experienced 8 beeps from LCD cable failure.

So, I am not sure your problem was the same, even based on what lhomme61 has reported...

I pulled the unit apart and found that any of the ram plugged into the C/D slots causes the error. If I leave 8 gig in A/B slots it boots fine.

...also, based on the beep code patterns published by Alienware, 4 beeps is a memory read/write failure problem. What may have happened in your case is the CF cable not being properly seated was somehow affecting the memory. I have seen strange and unexplainable things like that with electronics before. This is certainly something that lhomme61 can check while he has his laptop keyboard out to do additional testing of the RAM in slots C/D. It is a good practice to check the bridge cable while it is apart anyway, because it does not take a lot of disturbance to dislodge the connection at either end.

[lhomme61]

I did more thorough troubleshooting and found that none of the memory sticks are bad. I have isolated the issue to the C slot. Any stick placed in the slot causes the black screen/4 beep post error. I guess it's time to call Alienware for a repair.

For reference, on my system when I disconnected the SLI cable the computer would boot up but not recognize the GPUs.

[Mr. Fox]

Ah, man... I was hoping it was one of the memory stick. Rats... keep up posted, bro.

As far as the GPUs not being recognized with the SLI bridge disconnected, that's because the drivers have to be reinstalled if the cable comes loose. I'm not sure why that happens. They will work fine otherwise with the SLI bridge disconnected.

[lhomme61]

The repair person should be by tomorrow to replace the Mobo and memory if necessary. What is interesting to me on all this is how the M18x was acting prior to the failure. It seems to run in Windows fine but when I started to play Bioshock 2 it would BSOD a few minutes into the game and quickly shutdown and restart. Hopefully the memory slot failure is the only issue. We shall see...

[lhomme61]

Well the Dell rep came by and changed out the Mobo and all is well again. Hopefully that will be the last I have to worry about for a while. I know it's off topic but the stock memory was Hynix (?). Should I swap it out with a higher quality brand?

[Mr. Fox]

Congratulations! Very pleased to hear the repair went well.

You'll get a plethora pf mixed opinions on the subject. The best answer is "maybe so" depending on what your intent is, and what your expectations are. I have the stock Hynix DDR3-1600 memory from Dell, and (as you can see from my signature) it hasn't really hurt my benchmark scores. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the quality of Hynix memory. It's good stuff, or Dell would not be using it in their systems. (I have stock Hynix memory in all of my Dell/Alienware laptops and there has never been an issue.) I have my memory bus set to 1866Mhz and 1.6v and don't ever encounter any errors with those settings. Any benefit you might receive from buying faster memory will be more difficult to quantify than other upgrades, especially if competitive benching is not one of your primary goals. In my opinion, you would be better off putting the money toward a fast SSD drive or something else.

But, if you have the cash to spare... why not? Even a very modest performance increase is a good thing if you have the discretionary funds to spare. There are other threads for memory discussion, so I would encourage you to find those threads, read up, and jump into the discussion before making a decision on upgrading your RAM.