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Dell Optiplex 980 not booting up----Light 3 blinking on powering on the button

Rayan Tahir
By Rayan Tahir
in Troubleshooting
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Posted

Hi,

 

I am using a dell optiplex 980 with intel core 2 duo proccessor and 4 gigs of ram with 320 GB of WD Hard Drive. My PC got too much dusty inside There was a thick layer of dust on the motherborad near CPU Cooling Fan. So I Dissassembled the CPU Fan and cleaned out all the dust Thoroughly. After that I reassembled Fan and its wires. When I put the Power cord in power supply and pressed the power on button, There was only light 3 blinking near the power on button and no thing was happening. Please can anyone help me How to Diagnose it

 

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Posted

What color is the power button? Is the CPU power connector connected?

Main System: Phobos

AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (8C/16T), ASRock B450 Steel Legend, 16GB G.SKILL Aegis DDR4 3000MHz, AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB (XFX), 960GB Crucial M500, 2TB Seagate BarraCuda, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations/macOS Catalina

 

Secondary System: York

Intel Core i7-2600 (4C/8T), ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3, 16GB GEIL Enhance Corsa DDR3 1600MHz, Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB, 240GB ADATA Ultimate SU650, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations

 

Older File Server: Yet to be named

Intel Pentium 4 HT (1C/2T), Intel D865GBF, 3GB DDR 400MHz, ATI Radeon HD 4650 1GB (HIS), 80GB WD Caviar, 320GB Hitachi Deskstar, Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows Server 2003 R2

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Posted

You can find Dell's diagnostics light support page here (expand 2009-2012):

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/SLN284978/a-reference-guide-to-the-dell-optiplex-diagnostic-indicators?lang=EN#2009_to_2012

 

Based on light 3 it seems that it is either motherboard failure or a CPU problem depending on the power light.

"PSU brands are meaningless, look up the OEM."

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  • 2 years later...
Posted

I have the same problem, I took out the motherboard and now I get this beautiful blinking 3 

Main PC [The Rig of Theseus]:

CPU: i5-8600K @ 5.0 GHz | GPU: GTX 1660 | RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3000 MHz | Case: Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic | PSU: Corsair RM 650i | SSD: Corsair MP510 480 GB |  HDD: 2x 6 TB WD Red| Motherboard: Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro | OS: Windows 11 Pro for Workstations

 

Secondary PC [Why did I bother]:

CPU: AMD Athlon 3000G | GPU: Vega 3 iGPU | RAM: 8 GB DDR4 3000 MHz | Case: Corsair 88R | PSU: Corsair VS 650 | SSD: WD Green M.2 SATA 120 GB | Motherboard: MSI A320M-A PRO MAX | OS: Windows 11 Pro for Workstations

 

Server [Solution in search of a problem]:

Model: HP DL360e Gen8 | CPU: 1x Xeon E5-2430L v1 | RAM: 12 GB DDR3 1066 MHz | SSD: Kingston A400 120 GB | OS: VMware ESXi 7

 

Server 2 electric boogaloo [A waste of electricity]:

Model: intel NUC NUC5CPYH | CPU: Celeron N3050 | RAM: 2GB DDR3L 1600 MHz | SSD: Kingston UV400 120 GB | OS: Debian Bullseye

 

Laptop:

Model: ThinkBook 14 Gen 2 AMD | CPU: Ryzen 7 4700U | RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz | OS: Windows 11 Pro

 

Photography:

 

Cameras:

Full Frame digital: Sony α7

APS-C digital: Sony α100

Medium Format Film: Kodak Junior SIX-20

35mm Film:

 

Lenses:

Sony SAL-1870 18-70mm ƒ/3.5-5.6 

Sony SAL-75300 75-300mm ƒ/4.5-5.6

Meike MK-50mm ƒ/1.7

 

PSA: No, I didn't waste all that money on computers, (except the main one) my server cost $40, the intel NUC was my old PC (although then it had 8GB of ram, I gave the bigger stick of ram to a person who really needed it), my laptop is used and the second PC is really cheap.

I like tinkering with computers and have a personal hatred towards phones and everything they represent (I daily drive an iPhone 7, or a 6, depends on which one works that day)

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