Optiplex 7020 SFF PSU Beeping Faintly

power supply whine while in sleep mode and the power led blinks at the same rate as your beep.

@speedstep Thanks for the reply.  Any suggestions as to what to do about it, if that's the case?  The noise drives me nutty.

Turn your radio up louder

Ah, yes, the old English car driver's solution!

Actually, I had to listen very closely to make sure it was actually going away when the computer woke from sleep, and not just being drowned out by the fans.  And note that you were right about it beeping in sync with the flashing of the power light.  But note also the problem with just ignoring it, that is to say, the aforementioned mention of having had a power supply burst into flames on me.  Replacement is the simple and obvious solution, but I'm wondering if there's anything else to consider.

Power supplies that are real are not likely to have UL 94V safety rating if they burst into flames.

All Dell power supplies meet UL/CSA/VDE etc fire safety specifications.

https://www.csagroup.org/standards/

https://www.csagroup.org/standards/areas-of-focus/electrical/

https://www.vde.com/tic-en/portfolio/product-safety

UL 94, the Standard for Safety of Flammability of Plastic Materials for Parts in Devices and Appliances testing, is a plastics flammability standard released by Underwriters Laboratories of the United States. The standard determines the material’s tendency to either extinguish or spread the flame once the specimen has been ignited. The VW-1 (vertical wire burn) rating is sometimes erroneously associated with UL 94, but it (and some other flammability tests) is described by UL 1581 (Reference Standard for Electrical Wires, Cables, and Flexible Cords). 

https://www.deltapsu.com/en/products/download/UL/DRC-12V100W1AZ

UL E131881

Backwards UR is UL safety logo

And yet, it did happen to me, with a "real," name-brand, OEM power supply, albeit a one from a laptop, but one that was displaying the exact same symptom, hence my worry.  Painful burns to the fingers tend to make you more cautious.

Actually, I once had an OEM Dell desktop PSU go up in flames on me once, though in a quick flash rather than a continuous burn.  Also, this was in a more controlled environment of the workbench, as this was an already failed power supply I wanted to see if I could resurrect by replacing a clearly blown fuse with a new one of the correct spec.  Got it soldered in, which was enough to provide other components that were ready to go with the power they needed to burn out, rather impressively.  Fortunately, my expectation was that I wouldn't be able to fix it, but rather just wanted to see what would happen.  Working in hardware support, though, I've also seen impressive scorch marks on the inside of other failed OEM PSUs, where their filter caps had burst and burned.  The smell of seared electrolyte is, shall we say, impressive.  Admittedly, as that UL spec likely requires, burn damage was brief and contained.  With that Toshiba laptop, it wasn't, and if it hadn't happened in my hand, it likely would have burned my house down.

The bottom line, though, is that I'm wondering if replacement is the only fix for this issue.  Not a problem if it is, since as I mentioned, I had already ordered a replacement just as an upgrade.  But I wanted to toss it out there for future reference.

""real," name-brand, OEM power supply,"  Unfortunately these can be counterfeited.  That is why Dell laptops WILL NOT CHARGE if they do not detect the encrypted I2C chip that says "I am dell genuine:"  UL Safety standards say that you should be able to cut the cord on the brick and solder the wires together in a dead short and IF it catches fire the fire should go out within seconds. GENUINE Dell power supplies whether internal or external are UL CSA VDE ROHS TUV Etc safety rated.  This is another reason why the fake ones are easy to detect because they use FR4 circuit board material that burns and keeps burning even after the fuse blows.  Fire marshal investigating the product would determine that it was fake and thats why it kept burning.

Same is true if the Dell Desktop or Laptop detects the battery has been tampered with.  It will say unable to determine battery or charger and not charge. There are some tiny models of dell that actually use an external power brick like the Alienware X51.  For those models when users want to upgrade I recommend replacing the 240W power brick with 330W power brick.

Several high-profile incidents have raised awareness of the dangers. For example, in June 2006, a Dell laptop caught fire during a conference in Osaka, Japan.

there's a chance that the Lithium Polymer batteries could overheat or catch fire due to a battery design defect.

You can look up this or verify that with DELL and APPLE and HP and SONY and Toshiba etc.

That issue is not limited to Dell but is industry wide like fake capacitors are.

Statistically, the chances your laptop battery will catch fire are infinitesimally small. Since 1993, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has recorded 339 cases of overheated lithium and lithium ion batteries in portable electronics. Of those, 176 were laptops, according to the commission. No serious injuries or deaths have been reported.

Sony, the maker of the laptop batteries that Dell recalled, also makes batteries for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and other companies. Other than Apple, none of these companies have recently recalled any batteries, as of 2020.

Battery recalls haven't been limited to laptops. In 2005, lithium ion batteries in a Nikon digital camera, a Belkin GPS navigation system, and a Polaroid portable DVD player were recalled, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In fact, until recently, the largest safety recall of a consumer electronics product had been in October 2004 for 1 million lithium ion batteries used in Kyocera cell phones.  Capacitor fakes were responsible for Car Fires in Audi rear speaker systems. Capacitor failure,  can occur for a variety of reasons. They are defective manufacture, defective design, improper installation, shipping damage or an intervening biologic. Defective manufacture includes not enough fluid in the capacitor, insufficient plate gap or improper sealing of the capacitor housing. Defective design includes improper electrical specification (using the unit at an excessive voltage) or insufficient cooling of the electronic equipment.

@speedstep -- Thanks for all your time and effort.

My clearly OEM Dell Optiplex 7020 PSU makes a faint beeping noise  when the computer is sleeping.  Does anyone know if this can be fixed?

The noise is not a safety issue and the 7020 model is over 8 years old now so this is NEVER going to be fixed.

System design life cycle is 5 years max.

https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/Business_smb_merchandizing_Documents/en/us/Dell-OptiPlex-7020-Technical-Spec-Sheet-FINAL.pdf

The Dell OptiPlex 7020 is made with durable materials that measure up against real-world conditions. It has undergone Dell Highly Accelerated Life Cycle Testing (H.A.L.T.) and has withstood engineers’ tolerance limits for heat, cold, vibration, shocks and drops as well as UL CSA VDE TUV ROHS safety standards.

Well, I don't know about the "NEVER going to be fixed" part, since as I said, I'll be swapping the part out as soon as I can take delivery of the replacement part.  I was just hoping to save myself the annoyance until then.

BTW, that five-year planned obsolescence lifespan is, as I'm sure you understand, the time after which these machines generally go to system refurbishers, who pass them along to individual consumers like me.  So suggesting that a machine can't be fixed after that time is...well...not particularly useful.  I mean, tell that to my Perfection P-220 that I kept up and running for well over a decade.

Fixed by Dell is what I am referencing. After EOL EOS dell does not provide parts or service or warranty.  That doesn't mean it cannot be repaired but it does mean that Dell is not likely to offer warranty extension or repairs after the 5 year SDLC.

I still have Optiplex GX620 Towers from 2006 running at some sites.

Staying with TOWER models ensures you will be able to get parts to keep them going regardless of how old they get.

I even have Optiplex GX260 towers from 2003 running WIN98SE in underground elevator control systems.

PS2 keyboard and Mouse as well as Serial Port and Parallel port are needed for ancient control systems like power and water and other non internet building systems.

You have to dig now but you can still find GX620 towers for sale.

You can upgrade them to run every os from MSDOS all the way thru WINDOWS 10.

Not supported doesn't mean not working.

The navy still uses computers with Vaacuum Tubes and Cobol.

The nuvistor is a type of vacuum tube announced by RCA in 1959. Most nuvistors are basically thimble-shaped metal cans, but somewhat smaller than a thimble, and much smaller than conventional tube.

https://www.navy.com/careers/information-systems-technician

Firing control systems for battleships still use tubes today because they are emp proof and nuclear blast proof.

High voltage and current systems like radio transmitters and radar etc still use tubes as well as Microwave ovens still use tubes.  Solid state transistors and integrated circuits cannot handle the voltage and current required.

Yeah, being a musician, I do a fair amount of work with tubes.  I've got a '68 Fender Vibro-Champ, for instance, that is an ongoing project for me.  But there's a surprising amount of tube-based gear still being made.  I say "surprising" because it actually goes beyond the guitar amps you might expect to find tubes in.  For instance, I have a PreSonus mic preamp and compressor that has a tube in its preamp section, simply because it purports to provide a certain sound some musicians are looking for (when I took it apart to do some repair work on it, oddly, I found that the tube is soldered in, effectively giving it the entire device a limited lifespan!).  ART Pro Audio still makes several models of tube-based mic and instrument preamps that are quite popular.  And Bugera makes a positively killer bass amp with a preamp section that has three 12ax7 tubes in it, feeding into a 2000 watt RMS, class-D power amp section.  Talk about a blend of old and new tech!

Another class of consumer devices that uses tubes is all of the 40-watt-and-up laser cutter/engravers on the market.  You'll see diode laser engravers advertised a 15 and 20 watts, but that's a load of bull, since they're only quoting the iinput wattage, where the output wattage of these diode lasers is no more than about 4 watts, which is basically enough to cut paper, and engrave wood, leather, etc.  The units that will cut any reasonable thickness of material, such as those from GlowForge and Dremel, as well as the huge preponderance of Chinese "K40" laser cutters on the market, need to have a laser tube, as that's the only way to handle that much power.

BTW, my perennial favorite technological anachronism in military computing is the fact that the Air Force's ICBM control stuff is still backed up on 8" floppies.  I don't recall if it was coded in COBOL or FORTRAN, but it's a language of that vintage.  Basically, any sort of modernization would require taking the systems offline, which would be a fairly serious no-no!  And there's a general "if it ain't broke..." attitude.  There's a lot to say for that attitude, in fact, as will be confirmed by any of us who are still simmering about Microsoft having stopped support for XP.

And yeah, given the choice, I would have gotten another Optiplex mid-tower.  This machine was given to me for free by a friend who is a system refurbisher.  He was going to send me some components he had lying around to upgrade the Optiplex 790MT I already had, but instead, he just decided to toss them all into a machine with a fresh install of Win10 and send me that.  Didn't occur to me that it would be an SFF machine until I actually opened the box and saw it.  My own preference for mid-towers is actually due to their nice, standard PSUs, providing plenty of options for upgrading to higher wattages.  So it's actually nice that there's a slightly more powerful PSU available for this one.  For one thing, my problem, though not solved yet, should be solved within the next week or so.  For another thing, I should be able to power the beefier CPU (the current PSU should be able to handle that, since it's one of the CPUs the machine was originally speced out for), secondary HDD (the primary drive is an SSD, which will require negligible power), and graphics card.  The graphics card, then, is really the only thing that will pull more wattage, and I specifically bought this particular card because it had the lowest power requirement of any HD card on the market at the time.  I did this because I originally installed it into the last SFF machine I had, an HP for which there was absolutely no possibility of a PSU upgrade.

The nice thing about an SFF machine for this application, though, is that it fits into my TV stand, rather than needing to sit next to it.  BTW, perhaps the funniest thing about this particular machine is that it has three SATA ports on the mobo, but a power cable for only two devices.  I had to get a splitter in order to power the SSD, HDD and optical drives.  Conventional wisdom suggests that Dell just didn't figure on people trying to jam another drive into these machines.

Funny you should mention the difference between "no longer supported" and not fixable.  The whole reason I posted here in the first place was the basic assumption that I would not expect support from Dell on such an old machine.  As soon as I posted, though, I got an automated email from them asking for my service tag number so they could try to help me with my problem.  Should be interesting to see what, if anything, they have to say about it.

Maybe its a firmware root kit.