Hey chaps,

Recently took delivery of a motherboard today, it powers on, fans start up, beeps 3 times.... a pause.... beeps 7 times then turns itself off before repeating that process over and over and over.

I know the CPU's fine as it fully worked in my old system mere minutes beforehand.

Duff board???

google the bios beep error codes
go back to basics too, take everything except the cpu and heat sync, power on......listen for beeps (you should get a memory beep error)
add one componant at a time and repeat process.

Yep i've tried doing the whole, back to basics idea.

A quick google throws up the following:

"7 beeps: Virtual mode is one of the different modes that the processor can run in. The system is reporting an error when testing this mode.

Diagnosis: There is a problem related to the processor or motherboard. Note that this doesn't mean that the processor is necessarily dead, since the system won't boot at all with a dead processor."

The processor's fine, it has to be the motherboard :|

edit: also taken out of case. Only power switch and speaker plugged into board.

If the processor was working in another motherboard, but it's not working in this one.
First, check if it still works in the other board now.
If it does, then there's either a problem with the motherboard, or with the way you fitted the processor.

Done, tested as advised "need", processor works lovely in the old motherboard. Will reattempt a switch over again but I'm pretty confident it's the motherboard....

One thing I will note though, the beep was particularly faint in the new board, although surely that would just be down to the board and not the PSU as there's a very limited amount of components in it!?

yep, sounds like the motherboard.
What make/model is the motherboard? and do the beeps change if you have memory installed or not?

Motherboard beeps vary from board to board, some are loud, some not so loud.

It's a pretty new Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 (not the DS3)

It's also revision 1.1, and not 2.1 as was advertised... Although there's no mention of this error when I've read discussions on this board.

I posted something on the peregrinus forum, it's not good news I'm afraid.

Thanks for your help chaps.