boot - Is it normal for a Dell Inspiron 530 to have is fan to spin up 3 times before it POSTS?

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

Answer

While there have been answers to the part about the garbled screen, apparently the video card on the inspiron 530 (and the vostro 4000) - a gforce 8300GS is buggy, and the 3x power up attempts is fairly common with this model/configuration. Apparently switching the bios to boot off PCIe rather than PCI means it attempts to power up twice instead then boots normally.

Its not behavior common to dells, but with this specific model, its a common bug of unknown origin. The fix would be, presumably to swap the graphics card, but i don't think its worth it in this specific case.

EDIT: and.. apparently the system has integrated graphics, and popping out the card fixed the issue. I'd note, if someone can work out why this issue happens, with appropriate backup information, i'll select it as the right answer. Else i'll pick this.

Edit 2: And.. we might have a winner. The card's G86 based, and the laptop versions were notorious for overheating issues. It dosen't explain the random nature of the issues, or what exactly, but if someone else has similar problems and wants a why, this could be a useful, albeit sensationalist start. Even more digging yields this - and more interestingly "Random characters on the screen"

EDIT 3: The plot thickens - i installed windows 8, the windows 7 drivers for the card... and presto. it on powers the fans up once, then boots up like a decent system. i'm figuring it did some firmware replacement that fixed it up.

EDIT4: problem recurred. I'm going with onboard video for now