Anyone have these: Fujitsu Esprimo E3521 desktops?

[Zourous]

We have a classroom of 30 of these and a few others dotted around. They seem to have an intermittent fault that is driving us crazy. When you power on the PC it is meant to whirl up the fan for a second and then boot the PC as normal, but intermittently it gets stuck on the fan and then PC goes no further and nothing shows up on the screen. Sometimes by the time we've brought it back to the office it is working again and other times not. When it persists we've contacted Fujitsu support and they've come out and swapped the MB's out (about 5 or 6 now). The problem seemed to go away after the board change, but now we've got one whirling again that has had it's board changed, so Fujitsu have now taken the whole unit away for investigation. I have a nagging feeling though that it will come back with no fault found and Fujitsu are not admitting to this being a common fault they know about. The boards have the latest bios on them before anyone mentions.

 

Has anyone else experienced this fault?

[Guest salan]

We have these (and others in the range). It is a common problem and for us the answer is to take out the ram and reseat it. That usually cures it.

Alan

[pjhunt]

We have 66 in two Suites and experience the exact same problem, most times after an engineer has been out and changed motherboard/power supply, it has been fine except a couple which have re-offended, the engineer that came out to us stated that it is a common fault.

[Zourous]

Thanks guys, I didn't think it would be a simple explanation but at least I know other people have the same problem. We have around a year and a halfs worth of warranty left so we'll just have to get Fujitsu to repair them each time. It's not good for the teachers when they have large classes and they can't guarantee the PC's will boot. I'm not sure we'll buy fujitsu again.

[Zourous]

Bump,

 

These PC's are getting worst with age. I've worked out that it is almost certainly something to do with the PSU, but new replacement PSU's doesn't seem to 100% solve it. Anyone else suffering with these that can share any knowledge?

[pjhunt]

We have had power supply, motherboards and processors replaced and one still persists with the problem did you have extra RAM put in the machines?

[Zourous]

Yes we brought extra memory with the original PC order that we inserted ourselves, has this got something to do with it?

[TechSupp]

I have those as well but (touch wood) have not had any issues with them so far although I did have the very same issue once with some NEC's and it was the same solution, phone for warranty visit but same as you sometime even after changing everything we still ended up with the issue again so not just on Fujitsu. Fujitsu have been largely good for us previously but tend to get HP from ICT Direct now due to cost.

[Zourous]

TechSupp how many E3521's have you got and how long have you had them?

[TechSupp]

Would have to look that up, had them a while now, think they are out of warranty now so would have to be three plus years.

 

14 of the e3520 model

5 of the e3521 model

 

Thought I had more than that but they are various other models of Fujitsu.

Edited November 16, 2013 by TechSupp

[Zourous]

You only have 5, but still good to know. If you've never seen this particular problem in 3+ years you are either lucky or we have something different about our build or the parts inside. I don't think this problem is widespread, otherwise surely a lot more people would be out there complaining.

[Zourous]

Well it seems that replacing the PSU in a PC that is intermittantly failing to boot solves the problem. It has worked 8 times out of 9 with 1 exception. Whether these PSU's will continue to work for the long term remains to be seen. Just as a note, the original PSU's were rev3 and the replacement ones are rev4 (the one exception that needed replacing was also a rev4). When the fault occurs it makes it look like the MB is at fault and that is where the confusion was originally, but I believe the PSU is doing something to the MB. When the power has discharged from a MB that has been affected, it is usually ok again. Also another note on this system, I don't know if it is related or not, but we were using a microsoft driver for the graphics. There were reports that some of the PC's were crashing with display issues and then shutting down. Then when you tried to boot back up, you got the usual fan noise as originally described. Changing to the graphics driver supplied by Fujitsu seems to have fixed this.

[kendr01]

I have just bought one of these from an it recycling firm on ebay, The seller claimed it was just spinning fans and nothing else would happen.

 

The guy said it was untested beyond trying to power it up to find it had the issue described here, but it was obvious someone had been in this pc as the optical drive was missing and it has two odd 1gb rams (one samsung one crucial/micron) and had screws rolling loose inside the case So I decided to double check everything.

after ensuring all the loose screws had been found (one under motheboard) I cleared the cmos by removing the battery and holding the power button for a minute or two with the mains lead out and fitted a 4gb set of kingston hyperx ram i had hanging around and a copper based cpu cooler that i intended to fit anyway so i swapped them over.

 

I did notice that the standard thermal paste has not held up well (not covering well and had squeeze out) so I would recommend changing that for anyone with one of these.

 

I think the biggest issue may be a bios setting on the motherboard that governs start up and clearing cmos is all it would have taken to get this pc to boot, in the bios options you will find a setting that lets you choose either motherboard controlled startup or acpi.

 

It is my theory that the motherboard controlled start up is keeping some data in ram/cmos settings that is unreliable, which is why reseating ram or completely removing the psu seems to fix it (for a while), With the setting at acpi the unit I have is now bootng up fine even with a rev 03 psu.

 

If you have the problem in the future please before trying differnt hardware and power supllies try clearing the cmos (removing mains lead and cmos battery then holding down the power button will also clear ram) and see if the pc boots up properly, if it does then change that bios setting and let us know if you have the issue again.

 

I know this is my first post and all but does anyone else struggle with the quick reply box (edit box dos it too)? i was trying to type this post out for ages but it kept dropping letters so i had to type really slow and the box kept flickering/ refreshing and outsaving constantly, the advanced reply box isn't suffering at all.

Edited January 17, 2014 by kendr01

[Zourous]

Hi Kendr01, Interesting theory and I won't completely discount it, but I still think the problem lies with the PSU. When the problem first appears it is very intermittant. Yes, you can try different things and you think you've fixed it because the problems goes away. When it first started to happen to us, a simple power off, wait a few seconds and then power back on resolved the problem. Then some time down the line the problem becomes more frequent to the point where a simple power off and on doesn't work anymore and you have to leave the system unplugged for some time before it will eventually power back on again. I've had several PC's that would do this almost every day when booted. I change the power supply over for a new one, and now after a couple of months absolutley no problems. Good luck with yours, and no the quick reply is fine for me.

[kendr01]

After deciding the motherboard was fine I swapped it out into a different tfx sff case with a bigger psu so that i could fit a discrete gpu and have had no issues with it what so ever.

 

I moved the pegatron board that was in my old case into the esprimo case, this board has always been pretty reliable but since fitting it into the fujitsu case I have started having an issue booting reliably so you may be right about my theory being off track.

 

When starting from a cold boot the pc boots fine but if I hit restart from windows the boot device order changes, the hdd still shows as being detected during post though with the quiet boot option off, I keep having to go back into bios and reset the boot order during restarts.

 

This pegatron will automatically try to emulate usb devices as hdd or fdd based on size (below 530mb ffd above hdd) but even my empty usb multi flash card reader is given priority over the hdd, my guess is that you are right about the psu being an issue and somehow during a restart the hdd is not initialising/ powering up properly leaving me stuck on the boot device search screen (black with blinking cursor).

 

Unlike the fujitsu board I do not have the option to exclude specific devices from the boot order, they are redetected at every boot but somehow the hdd is just losing it's priority during restarts, this may well be an issue with the psu not powering the drives properly.

 

The thing that threw me with this pc from the start was the fact that the psu, heatsink and motherboard looked brand new, no dust whatsoever on/in any of them, if it wasn't for the odd ram sticks and a few scratches to the case and the coa being missing I would have guessed it was new old stock, but now I am starting to think it had suffered a booting issue from new and had been scavenged for parts.

 

Either way I can't complain for £35 I have a decent ddr3 motherboard, an e5800 cpu and 250gb Seagate hdd to play with, If I can find a way to fit a standard tfx psu into the fujistu case I might keep that one too if not I will just buy another case for the pegatron board.

[Zourous]

Contacted Fujitsu about these faulty psu's. We have now had 10 out of 35 fail in the same way in just under 3 years. To my mind this highlights there is a common issue with the psu's and that the rest will probably go the same way. I think psu's should last longer than this. I asked for a replacement psu for all the pc's that haven't already had one but they refused. Do you think this is fair under the circumstances? The warranty is up in August. Fujitsu have never acknowledged that this is a known fault, although the engineers that have come out seem to think it is.

[Guest midomidi2013]

We have 66 in two Suites and experience the exact same problem, most times after an engineer has been out and changed motherboard/power supply, it has been fine except a couple which have re-offended, the engineer that came out to us stated that it is a common fault.

[TechSupp]

Well, I earlier posted I only 5 of these :-)...well I now have 4 :-( ...you guessed it PSU gone! Replacement PSU quoted at £70, think ICT Direct may get a call, can nearly get a whole PC of similar spec for that, unless anyone has a dead one but has a good PSU and wants to get rid?

[Zourous]

@TechSupp was it a rev3 psu by any chance? It's a shame Fujitsu don't own up for this fault. Dell owned up about the dodgy caps on gx270 mb's in the past and replaced them free of charge up to a certain date. Every pc or laptop i've sent to fujitsu for testing comes back NFF. I've even explained to them how to reproduce the fault and they still come back with the same result. They are in denial! Doesn't make me want to buy any Fujitsu stuff in the future.

[Zourous]

Now 11 out of 35, another one failed this morning

[nickb23]

yep we have got 17 in a suite, and I think that an engineer has been out approx 12 times sofar. I have had 2 go today, with one of those being repaired twice before (last time was 2 weeks ago!!!)

 

Thisa is a serious issue and it must show Fujitsu there is a design flaw somewhere.... I am going to reseat the memory to see if that works right now, but I am awaiting a call back from Fujitsu..

 

Nick

[maddog69]

Hi All,

 

I seem to have resolved this problem, well so far so good put it that way. If it's an Intel chip board there are 3 large capacitors on the board and i noticed the tops were bulging slightly so i de soldered them and re soldered some new ones and this seems to have cured the problem. Be careful if you attempt this though as it's quite tricky. Hope this helps

[Zourous]

Sorry, you may have similar symptoms and this may fix this for you in your case, but I don't think this is the same as my problem. I've had now had 15 out of 35 PSU's replaced in this model of PC. In every case it has fixed the problem 100% so can't be anything to do with capacitors on a motherboard.

[difinity]

A common cause of PSU failures is capacitors. If they have used cr@p on their motherboards it's realistic to think they used them is their PSUs.

[maddog69]

All i can say is that the symptoms sound very similar and on changing the psu the symptoms still persisted however when i changed the caps it worked like a dream. I have now done this on 10+ pc's and touch wood they are still ok,so i can only speak as i find.