Opps....

[Teamsreth]

I have a Dell optiplex tower, which I had been using for gaming. ( I know, I know )

Booting up one day, there was a small pop, so I pulled the plug. Pop happened just as the Windows logo popped up. Open her up, everything seemed fine. No burnt smell, no strange marks anywhere.

I booted up, no issues, logged on, fine. Loaded up speedfan, and ati tool. Temps fine, fans on, checked emails, and it powered down. Since then will not turn on.

The front panel with the power button stank, and wouldn't light up. The orange led on mobo was on, but front panel seemed dead.

I swapped out GPU, PSU, RAM. GPU in, and out, using onboard. Ram, each stick in each slot, 2 in, one in. PSU conected to Mobo, and to everything. I had to touch the power pins to start up. But no video output.

I have case fan spinning, CPU fan spinning, GPU spinning, HDDs whiring, and the cd drive opens, and seems to read, but I have no video output at all. I have tried on 3 monitors, and tried various combinations of stuff in, and stuff out, but no video output at all.

I seem to have broken something, and have exhausted my, admittedly poor, knowledge base.

Anyone have any ideas to try, of diagnosis to give before I resort to violence? I mean, it ain't going to work any less.

In the meantime, back to the speed machine (athlon 3700+), thanks in advance.

[peterb]

At a guess (and these things are really hard to diagnose without seeing the kit) it could be one of two things. Either a wire has if a wire came adrift (possible one going to the front panel power switch) and shorted against something. The other possibility is that a capacitor has popped somewhere, possibly on the video card, which would appear to be dead.

You really need to give all the components a good visual examination to see if there are any popped capacitors or any marks that might indicate where a short cct may have occurred.

[iNoXious]

My guess would be your mobo, if you have an old GPU lying around try putting that in and see if it works, all you can do is to exchange each bit of hardware individualy until you have pin-pointed the problem. Good luck buddy

[Teamsreth]

My guess would be your mobo, if you have an old GPU lying around try putting that in and see if it works, all you can do is to exchange each bit of hardware individualy until you have pin-pointed the problem. Good luck buddy

Cheers, tried 2 different GPU's, ram, PSU, and tried wishing, but no output.

Either I need to figure out a way to hook up the two HDD from the dead one to my old one. Or I need to get a new case, mobo, and so on. Stupid backwards Dell thing. I can play Fallout3 and BF2 tho, so all is not lost. Cheers

[oldboy47]

Have you tried working through the Dell problem fixing thread? I had very similar recently on a friends Dell Dimension 5000. The problem was the graphics card.