www.nickhodge.com

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.