DRAM error beep on startup

[Houston3000]

I recently built my PC and everything is running perfectly, however there is one glaring issue that keeps bugging me. When I start my system (power on not restart) I get one long beep before it shows my video card information. Once the beep is over the system boots perfectly fine with a single short beep and into windows.

I have:

Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 Motherboard
Intel C2D E6400
256MB Geforce 7900GS
GeiL 1GB (2x512) DDR2 800Mhz RAM

After looking in my manual it says that 1 long beep and 1 short beep is either a "DRAM or M/B error" . So, my best guess would be a RAM issue, the GeiL is not in the supported RAM list for the motherboard for the 800Mhz range but, really, only about 5 different types of 800Mhz RAM are in the list and, at the top of the document listing the compatibility types, in big bold letters, it states that they there are too many types of RAM to approve or disapprove and many aren't listed but can still be compatible. My memory checks out fine as a GB of Dual Channel Interleaved DDR RAM when the system posts at start up and shows up as a "1.00 GB of RAM" in Windows.

I could really use some help figuring this out, the motherboard uses "Award Bios" and I recently flashed it to the newest version. According to Newegg the RAM I purchased has timings of 4-4-4-12 and a voltage of 2.1V. I have no problems what-so-ever while using my computer but I don't want something to be wrong that could potentially be damaging good components. Is it possible the timings or voltages are wrong and, if so, does anyone know of an area in the BIOs I could change that to match my RAM.

I haven't run programs like Memtest but I honestly am kind of clueless with how that works, if you think I need to run something like that what site should I download it from and what type of errors should I be cautious about? On the same token, does it sound like it could possibly not even be a memory error - maybe someone with this motherboard has had this beep sequence before?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I posted this in the Mobo forums as well but I think it may be best to ask here as well.

 

[Z28SHAKER]

to run the memtest you have to download it and burn it to a a cd using iso image to disc

as you start your computer it will automatically boot and start the scan, i usually select a single test #5 thats where i found my errors in ram

if you bought the memory brand new, you dont have to worry about it, i bought a used 512 stick and it had over 200,000 errors, so it was no good, im in the process of trying to get a refund from the seller on e-bay.

 

[Houston3000]

Well, I found the timing settings in my BIOS and set it manually to run at 4-4-4-12 and added 0.3v to the voltage, hopefully that will sort out any incompatability issues the mobo may be having.

That being said, after getting some responses in the other forum it seems that there is an issue with my processor running "too" cool on startup. As in the Heatsink/Fan doesn't start spinning up right away on a cold boot (something like that, or maybe just the temperature of the processor registers out of whack) this causes the "CPU/System Fan Fail Warning" to sound off. After disabling this warning it seems to have fixed the issue, everything in my case is definitley spinning with a nice low temp.

Problem is I won't be able to tell if the problem is fully resolved until I boot it up when I get home from work today, if I still get errors I'll make sure to run the memtest overnight. Thanks for the response