I picked up an used Dell 530 desktop. It seems to work, but it has an odd pattern of powering up the case fan (which might be faulty - it sounds like a jet engine) 3 times, while blinking the power light. No other fan seems to activate during the time, and it goes silent after that.
I'm wondering, it this is normal behaviour, or is there some issue that's causing it? It might have some BIOS quirks - the words in the BIOS was garbled the first few times, then fixed itself. The system has nothing but a video card (nvidia - I think it's a 8300GS), ram and PSU at the moment.
Screenshot of the BIOS (which is no longer an issue) - it was functioning normally other than the language being Swedish chef. This is a secondary issue, and apparently dosen't happen to everyone with the same issue.
EDIT(s): memtest is clean, but swedish chefed the same way during one run. Swedish chefing seems random - i got swedish chefed output about 6 minutes into one run of memtest, then normal output during a half hour run of memtest.
Reflashing the bios (to version 10.18) makes it spin up the fans thrice still (i thought it was twice, for some reason, mistake on my part. No idea if random swedish chefing persists, but it hasn't happened yet
no obvious capasitor plague - they all look shiny and flat.
Edit 2: I had failures with both windows 7 and linux booting up, and ended up removing the video card in question. If you have a dell 530 with a 8300GS, i seriously recommend binning the video card at the first sign of trouble