Ask the folks at Gigabyte what the siren alarm means.

Al wrote:

> Hey all, a few months ago my pc started to crash randomly at various stages
> during the boot process and sometimes a few minutes after windows had loaded
> (up to 20 minutes in). I couldnt fix the problem, and was told that if it
> crashed during BIOS then it was definatly a hardware problem. I notcied that
> the graphics card was noisey, the motherboard fan occasionally stopped
> spinning completely and that one of the pins on power supply connection to
> the motherboard had turned black as if it had burnt.
>
> To fix the problem today I got a new motherboard, a new graphics card and a
> new power supply unit. The computer no longer fails during startup but every
> so often it crashes, the screen goes black and I get a siren style sound for
> a few seconds, then it shuts down.
>
> New Specs:
> Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ (socket A) Motherboard
> XFX Ge Force 6200 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (AGP) (PVT44ARAMG) Graphics card
>
> It is the first time I have put a computer together by myself (but not the
> first time I have been inside the computer upgrading and reconnecting various
> hardware). I just noticed that in System Information it says "total physical
> memory 512.00 MB" even though I only actually have 256MBs.
>
> Other Specs:
> 256 DDR RAM
> AMD Athlon 2009Mhz
> Sound Blaster sound card
>
> One thing that confused me when preparing the motherboard was the Set System
> Jumper section, it says: "Open: Auto, Close: 100Mhz (default). Auto: Support
> FSB 266/333/400 Mhz CPU. The JP1 must be set to Auto when you are using FSB
> 266/333/400Mhz CPU." I think the CPU I am using is 333Mhz (but dont know how
> to check) so I took out the Jumper pin.
>
> Any ideas what is wrong? How can I manually change the RAM amount to 256MBs?
> Is this probably the problem? Thanks a lot for any help, let me know if more
> info is needed.
>
> Cheers
> Alex