motherboard fried ?

[Cletis]

friend has a dell optiplex gx 280. i have not opened it yet. but when i turn on, the monitor does not come on, and the fan gets louder and louder and it sounds like it is going to explode. i believe the motherboard is dead because i dont even see DOS pop up when i start it up, which kinda makes me think the pc thinks its overheating and keeps making the fan go faster and faster. but idk.. how i can fix this if its fixable ? need pics ?

[Cephius]

Do you hear any beeps on start up?

It could be the video card, have you tried swapping that out?

Have you dusted out the interior?

Try taking it apart a bit and seeing if you can get anything to display and then post again. Or just call Dell tech support and they'll run through the basics with you.

[Mojo]

Beep codes are usually the easiest way to diagnose a hardware malfunction, although they don't always work. Broken RAM can also cause this problem, so if you can't figure it out by the beep codes, consolidate to a single RAM stick and try moving it between different RAM slots(try both sticks). If that doesn't get it working, then it's probably not worth it to try and fix seeing how old it is.

[Cletis]

no beeps

i took the fan off the cpu heat sink .. not knowing it was the cpu heat sink lol.. i just took that fan off cause that was the one spinning faster and faster. cleaned everything with a can of air. still same shit. going to try the ram now. thanks for the replies.


edit. oh.. and i think the video card is onboard.. so i cant switch it yeah ?

[Spekkio]

could be as simple as a bad PSU. pulling off the CPU heatsink was probably a bad move as now you may have to remove the current goo and replace it with a new application.

[Kohan]

could be as simple as a bad PSU. pulling off the CPU heatsink was probably a bad move as now you may have to remove the current goo and replace it with a new application.

You will have to, for sure. If you ever remove a heatsink that's been on an operating processor before, you have to clean off the old compound and replace it before putting it back on.

[Spekkio]

i've done it before, and nothing burned up, but at the time i admittedly knew what i was doing wasn't too bright. it was a box i didn't care too much about as long as it stayed up for a few days. nothing went wrong, but as a long term solution, i wouldn't suggest it.