How to repair a Dead Dell 3008WFP Monitor

[laptopleon]

Another 'member' has joined

I bought mine in 2008 for around € 1.400 excluding taxes, so it wasn't exactly cheap, but it worked for 15 years, before it want all black on me last month, so I'm not complaining. If I remember correctly, the build-in usb hub failed fairly soon after I bought it, but after the the guarantee that was only 1 year back then.

Thanks to @Knightwolf for putting me on track of this thread.

I'm not an electronics repair-man by trade, but I've repaired, rebuild and upgraded quite a few devices through the years, since I was a teen.

I've ordered the right type of diodes and some desoldering lint. I have some cooling paste, cooling pads, solder and a solder gun laying around somewhere.

@DigitalStefan This monitor was one of the first with a DisplayPort connector, if I remember correctly. The downside of this, is that modern graphics cards not always play nice with it. It seems that not all screen resolutions work. I noticed that some of the standard resolutions work, but do not scale to the full resolution of the screen. Instead, they are displayed 1 pixel signal to 1 pixel on the screen, with a large, black border of unused pixels around the image. Not sure if this is because of the modern GPU or because of the older screen hardware, but I never had this with older computers.

 

[EsaT]

I've ordered the right type of diodes and some desoldering lint. I have some cooling paste, cooling pads, solder and a solder gun laying around somewhere.

It's usually capacitors wearing out which eventuall kills monitors.
Semiconductors like diodes and transistors are more like on-off and either work really long time, or fail fast from undersizing.

 

[ebilcake]

Damn, I remember when this was the high end monitor to own... had the Dell 2405FPW... Can't imagine many are still working without carrying some issues.

 

[laptopleon]

The suggested plastic cards, didn't cut it, so I used some putty knifes to get the bezel off. The horizontal parts came off relatively easy, but the vertical ones were tough.

The power board is also fastened by two screws around the 220 Volt connector. This is not specifically mentioned in the starter post. Even with those out of the way and the broad connectors loosened, the power board would not easily let go. I had to really pull it out.

The hardest part for me by far though, was desoldering the pins of the heatsink. It was hard to get the solder melted, even with a 100W soldering pistol. Even if some solder would melt, after a while, as soon as I put the desoldering lint against it, the temperature would drop a bit and the whole thing would be solid again, also fixing the desoldering lint to the solder Someone suggested using a special kind of solder, with a lower melting point, to delude the hard solder with, but I fear the heavy metals in it. Heating up the heatsink a bit, didn't help much. I didn't dare heating it up to serious temperatures out of fear of damaging other components or the board.

If I had to do it again, I would simply cut the pins of the cooling part with pliers, because they don't really need to be soldered down. The heatsink is kept in place anyway by the screws.

It helps to loosen the screws of the diodes first, so that they are no longer cooled by the heatsink.

I took pictures of every step, for myself, to make putting it together easier. I highly recommend using something to hold the screws separated, like this:

After the diodes were removed, the new ones were placed and neatly soldered, I found out both were fixated about 3 mm too far from the board… So I had to desolder them AGAIN, clean up the board and solder them back once more! Argh!!!

This took another 45 minutes of patience. I really hope it will work again after I put everything together again..

 

[laptopleon]

I just put it all together again, but the monitor still does not switch on

Any ideas what it might be? Caps?

 

[Cyber-Mav]

odd the STPS40170CT replacement diode seems to be of much lower spec than the original diode. ST replacement is 20A current where as the original vishay ones is 30a

 

[TRX4]

Hi all,
I might have one of the oldest 3008WFP - (Rev AO1) bought circa 2007 it was my main screen for CAD work until 3 years ago when I upgraded to a 42" 4k gigabyte aorus monitor (actually not that great at displaying lines in CAD but has loads more real estate, more of a gaming monitor i believe but means i don't have to constantly zoom in and out!) and I've used the Dell as a second display since then. Unfortunately the screen started displaying horizontal lines or just one half of the screen when it 'woke' each morning a few months ago. Turning it off and on again made it work for a few months, but this morning it finally died. No led power light and disconnecting the power lead and cables, holding the power button etc doesn't do anything.
I quickly found this thread and it's given me the confidence to give the repair a go, so a big thank you to the OP Embalse and all the other contributors.
I've ordered 2 diodes, de-soldering braid, heat transfer paste and aluminium tape from the farnell uk website for a grand total of @£30 (I already have a temp. controlled soldering kit) - hopefully the D22 diode is the culprit....if not it's only a £30 gamble and a few hrs work before I buy a new second monitor. I will try and remember to post whether or not it works.
Thanks again to all the contributors for all the pictures, links and info.

 

[embalse]

Hi all,
I might have one of the oldest 3008WFP - (Rev AO1)

Good luck. With patience, it should be an easy fix.

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