I've just purchased an Abit NF7-S Motherboard, an Athlon 2600 (300MhzFSB), Sapphire Radeon 9500 pro and 2x512Mb DDR PC3200 in dimm3 and dimm2 after installing everything, I switched on the pc and got 3 beeps, the first one longer than the rest. thinking the graphics card (I read that the first long beep could be gfx on the Abit site) might be wrong, I swapped it out for my old GeForce4 MX 440 SE card, but the same thing happens when I switch on the pc I then tried only putting 1 of the dimms in dimm3 slot (then trying the other 1) to see if one of the memory chips were blown. Nothing is displayed on screen (blank screen), just 3 beeps. any ideas?

Your board uses an award bios and one long two short means video error for that board. You'd be amazed how easy it is to not fully seat the card. Make sure it is fully pushed in.

thanks for quick response. ok, took out the GF4 card, tried putting the Radeon 9500 pro back in, pushed card hard, white tab clicked onto the card holding it in place, same thing happens when switching on. Anything else to try ?

if your old machine had a sub-300w power supply that could be it. Always a good idea to reset the bios. cpu must be under the cpu lever. hth

PSU = 380W Have reset bios using CMOS clear jumper Have even tried putting 1 memory stick in dimm1 interestingly though, I thought I held down INSERT, then DEL, then F10, then Y, then ENTER, and the machine reset itself, I've had the award bios on previous machine so guessed how to get into BIOS, so it seems the motherboard is working but 2 different gfx cards dont want to work with it Any more ideas and thanks for the ones so far. Matt

Also just tried third graphics card GF2, still get same problem. any more ideas ?

does the computer shutdown after the beep codes? well i had a similar problem with my soyodragon kt333 ultra awhile back had some mysterious beepcode NO ONE and i mean NO ONE could figure out including the guys at soyo. well it would beep 3 times one long if i remember and then shut down. i accidently bumped the wire set going from my thermal censor that controlled my fan speed for the cpu (pluged directly into the motherboard cpufan1slot) and noticed it was Hot. come to find out the censor that went under the cpu that i folded to make fit was causing some kind of resistance which in turn was sending a message to the motherboard that the main cpu fan was not working. Thus shutting down the system. hope this helps. maybe you have some kind of faulty fan or other hardware sending back a message to the m/b saying there is problem and keeping it from booting -Josh