strange beep codes, not at rated speed

[afuzzyrock]

My mostly home built computer has been though a lot with numerous failing parts over the years, recently we were forced to replace the motherboard and processor (and on board stuff like ram) but we were able to keep drives and pci cards. We decided to upgrade a bit so we got an Iwill ka266plus motherboard(non raid version), 256 mb ram (unsure of brand), and an amd 1200 mhz Athalon with retail box. the machine went together okay but wouldnt boot, it would keep beeping and beeping. Eventually we got it to boot by setting the bus speed down to 200 mhz. Now the computer runs, and has been for a while. However, the machine is running at 900 mhz instead of 1200. Even the boot speed test says 900. Setting the bios and/or the jumpers back up to 266 mhz bus renders the system unstable and causes it to boot only once in about 10 trys, otherwise it just sits there turning on and off over and over by itself. Until we set the jumpers back and clear the bios to defualt settings, the system remains in this state. At 200 mhz bus it boots consistently, but it is making incosistent beep codes at startup. This leads me to the conclusion that something is terribly wrong. I have an award bios. This is my last try before considering the system doomed and leaving it at 900 mhz. Anyone got any ideas?

note: the system makes inconsistent beep codes at 200 mhz bus but continues booting and runs okay. The three codes i have noticed are:
1. 1 long beep 1 short soon after
2. 1 long beep, then it continues to boot, after first boot screen it makes additional 1 short beep
3. very rarely makes one long beep like i think it supposed to(only happened once or twice)

ahalon 1.2 gigs
award bios
Iwill ka266plus (not r) motherboard
256 mb of cheap pc 2100 ram

[Mr N8]

I think you need to set the FSB to 133mhz. After you do that, you should get something after your post screen that will say
133Mhz x 2 FSB.

Nate

[RenegadeKing]

Make sure that you have pc133 ram.

[afuzzyrock]

pc 2100 ram you mean.... it uses the rising and falling sides of the 133 mhz bus to be equivelant to 266. The stuffs' gotta be built for it though. the order sheet says 2100 ram...the only thing could be that they lied and its really pc 1600 ram... That could explain it. It was cheap ram. Preferrably I want to fix this without spending more money however. It woudn't explain why it ran at 266 mhz bus for a short time but unstable and erratically booting. If it was pc 1600 ram it shouldn't have run at that speed at all, if it was 2100 it shouldn't be working on a 200 mhz bus like it is now. This could be all becuase of the bargain ram I used... but it doesnt explain everything like changing system beeps and ram running at both bus speeds. Im in a hurry right now, please excuse improper english or mispelled words. Any suggestions are welcome.