Dead motherboard, bad DIMM slots or what?

[henryu]

My PC had been running fine for about 6 months, it has a MSI P67A-GD53 motherboard in it which I bought originally to replace an old ASUS motherboard which died after about 4 years of use. I had 8 gigs of RAM in it until today when I tried to upgrade to 16 gigs. After I put in the new RAM sticks into their slots and I started the machine, it just produced 3 long beeps and then shut down. The computer would then after a few seconds try to start up again, but again with just 3 long beeps to no avail. The 2 new RAM sticks I bought and installed were identical to the ones already in the machine, I've upgraded RAM before the same way without anything like this happening. I could smell a strange smell briefly as well, as if maybe something burnt? However I couldn't see any visible damage or think of what would have caused the smell.

I then took the new RAM sticks out and tried starting up the PC without them (in the same configuration with the 2 RAM sticks it had which worked before the attempted upgrade) but the PC would still give the 3 long beeps and won't POST or stay on for more than 15 seconds or so. It makes the 3 beeps regardless of how much RAM I put in, even if there isn't a single stick. I've tried just having 1 RAM stick in nearest to the CPU, I took out the graphics card (Nvidia GTS8800) and hard drives, but nothing changes.

I'm kind of left at a loss as to what's broken or why... am I already going to need to buy a new mobo? Any help would be greatly appreciated or info on what caused this or what I did wrong.

 

[cin19]

Take the button battery to reset the CMOS (wait for 10min), then re install the RAM one by one.

 

[henryu]

Thanks for the tip, unfortunately I tried exactly that and it still didn't work, the same 3 long beeps happen no matter what. Luckily the mobo is still under warranty as it's only 6 months old, so I'm going to RMA it to the manufacturer. I spent all day testing my other components with another working motherboard, and the resulting build worked fine, so I can only conclude as I suspected in the first place which is that somehow the DIMM slots on the motherboard fried or broke when I put more RAM in.

Has anyone ever heard of anything like this happening? I've upgraded RAM countless times but never had anything fizz or catch fire on a mobo before as a result. I would be curious to hear from the manufacturer, haven't had a chance to speak with them yet. I presume my mobo was defective from the factory, and this was bound to happen when someone put 4 sticks in (previously the machine had only had 2 4GB RAM sticks in). The strange thing is that the RAM sticks which fried all 4 DIMM slots (or memory controller maybe) on MSI mobo work fine on the ASUS mobo I tried them on just now.

 

[cin19]

Call MSI and make the RMA request.