10 ms·

This type of noise is arguably worse than that produced by a well-managed fan setup. If you have fans that spin at a constant RPM, you can fairly easily tune ou

This type of noise is arguably worse than that produced by a well-managed fan setup. If you have fans that spin at a constant RPM, you can fairly easily tune out the noise. Coil whine will vary depending on the load of the system (e.g., when you start/stop scrolling a web page), making it much more difficult to tune out.

RowanH 8y ago
Never heard coil whine for years and years decades infact of PC building. Until last year I got my shiny new fancy pants blast furnace, (aka GTX 1080 TI), which has near dead silent fans at idle/light loads. The minute that bad boy starts working an obnoxious screeching/whine starts. Super annoying compared to the rest of the build being a beast of a machine and watercooled that's so quiet I'm more likely to hear the noise floor on speakers than the PC (which is on the desk, next to said speakers).
- jaytaylor 8y ago
  My GTX 970 does the same thing. It is incredibly annoying. Fortunately it happens when at high load, which is while playing games. This doesn't help for quiet scenes, though. Is there a way to fix this sound in video cards? I'll have to investigate.
  - ovao 8y ago
    Coils emit a relatively high-frequency sound, so your best bet is a case with thick panels, that’s fairly well enclosed, and has some acoustic dampening. Most cases made today don’t have any significant dampening material. It’s pretty trivial to add some to the panels without significantly affecting cooling capacity.
    - cellularmitosis 8y ago
      Alternatively, if you wanted to really dig into this, you could try to find every switch-mode power supply and replace them with (much less efficient) linear power supplies. You'd need a larger water-cooling system though.
      - hatsunearu 8y ago
        Is this a joke? That would require making your own GPU PCB, and maybe a year's worth of studying on electronics and power supply design.
        cellularmitosis 8y ago
        Not really. More likely just desoldering a couple of key components and soldering in a few wires to a dsughterboard with a linear regulator. A year’s worth of power supply design? Have you looked at the LM7805 datasheet? The circuit is one regulator and two capacitors...
        magicalhippo 8y ago
        Have you looked at the current requirements for CPUs and GPUs? We're talking 100A or more. Even if the input was 3.3V, which it isn't, a linear regulator down to 1.1V would have to dissipate 220W or more. You'll need a bigger heatsink for the linear regulator than for the CPU... And designing a 250W-capable linear regulator is not as simple as just hooking up a LM7805. So with a modern CPU and GPU, your talking ~400W of power to the actual components, and nearly 500W wasted in the linear regulators. This of course also means you have to get a 1000W PSU as a bare minimum.
        hatsunearu 8y ago
        Here's the problem: not only do you have to dissipate 200W+ for your pass element, you need to drive it ultra fast with an extremely fast analog circuit that can withstand the massive magnetic fields (which pretty much means you need a PCB). Yeah and good luck driving a 200W linear element (if it even exists, lol) with a few op amps--the driver which should deliver a few amps into the gate/base of the pass element, which in and of itself is a pretty difficult challenge.
        hatsunearu 8y ago
        old thread but LMFAO you can't be any more wrong. You need /much/ more careful design to get GPU-compliant performance. The dI/dt on modern ASICs are insane, and you need an insane regulator to deal with it.
    - lutorm 8y ago
      I was going to say, I can hear coil whine if I stick my ear into the machine, but it doesn't make it out past the acoustic dampening panels in my case.
  - diamondo25 8y ago
    I've had a GTX 460 and a GTX 660 Ti before, and once I upgraded to a GTX 970 i was disappointed by the coil whine. I could even see the effect of the power drain on my secondary screen when I booted up GTA 5. Guess we'll have to live with the fact that the tech cannot keep up with the demand and quality, resulting in more 'unstable' electronics.
- corysama 8y ago
  My 1080TI also has an obnoxious whine that precisely reflects activity on the card. On the upside, when I’m working in CUDA, I can listen to my algorithms and get a hint at how they are working :)
  - flashman 8y ago
    Yeah I can tell by the various fans whether an application has crashed or the whole system.
- developer2 8y ago
  Coil whine with graphics cards is such a frustrating experience, because there is no informed consensus as to what the underlying cause truly is. Everyone has their own anecdotal reason: a) Maybe coil whine is an intrinsic factor in the manufacture of graphics cards, similar to dead pixels on displays. "Luck of the draw" when obtaining one is the only way to win. Cycle through RMAs until you get one with little to no coil whine. b) Or, it depends which company you buy from: each of Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac et al are supposedly better or worse than the others. c) Or, it's not a problem with the GPU at all; rather, it's an indication of a poor quality power supply (PSU). I've never seen an informed analysis from an industry engineer who has a goddamn clue what they are talking about. NVIDIA could probably enlighten us all with an exact-science explanation, but that seems unlikely. My uneducated guess is that the situation is closest to option 'a' above, and that rejecting units for coil whine during quality control would drastically reduce production yield.
  - ovao 8y ago
    Yeah, I don’t see NVIDIA or AMD drawing any attention to product flaws, particularly if the end-user solution is “RMA until you get a good one”. Instead, ping a few review sites and see if any of them are willing to take a crack at it.
gambiting 8y ago
My fiancee has a mouse(Logitech MX Master) which has a very-high pitched coil whine, but only when you move it. It's the most infuriating thing in the universe, but apparently she can't hear it. So yes, random coil whine is about 10000x worse than fans.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  That's not the mouse, but the CPU causing coil whine when the mouses causes the kernel to up it's CPU usage as you fly across various GUI elements.
  - mohn 8y ago
    Unless you've tested OP's fiancee's system yourself and found that to be the case, I wouldn't be so sure. I had a Logitech G500 with awful coil whine and the opposite problem: it would stop whining when moving and start when idle. I suspect it had to do with the power saving mode that lots of mice have, where the laser power supply ramps down to dim the laser illumination after a period of no detected motion.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    A lot of times I've noticed it's the USB controller. It's quite evident when you have headphone ports near USB ports.
    - sgtmas2006 8y ago
      I can be tabbed out and hear when I get into the plane in PUBG from the increase in whine. It's quite nice actually.
  - zrobotics 8y ago
    Not necessarily. Possible, but I had a cheap HP mouse that whined briefly when it first came out of sleep mode. Couldn't have been the computer, since it would make the same noise when the PC was turned off.
  - gambiting 8y ago

RowanH 8y ago

Never heard coil whine for years and years decades infact of PC building. Until last year I got my shiny new fancy pants blast furnace, (aka GTX 1080 TI), which has near dead silent fans at idle/light loads. The minute that bad boy starts working an obnoxious screeching/whine starts. Super annoying compared to the rest of the build being a beast of a machine and watercooled that's so quiet I'm more likely to hear the noise floor on speakers than the PC (which is on the desk, next to said speakers).

jaytaylor 8y ago
My GTX 970 does the same thing. It is incredibly annoying. Fortunately it happens when at high load, which is while playing games. This doesn't help for quiet scenes, though. Is there a way to fix this sound in video cards? I'll have to investigate.
- ovao 8y ago
  Coils emit a relatively high-frequency sound, so your best bet is a case with thick panels, that’s fairly well enclosed, and has some acoustic dampening. Most cases made today don’t have any significant dampening material. It’s pretty trivial to add some to the panels without significantly affecting cooling capacity.
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    Alternatively, if you wanted to really dig into this, you could try to find every switch-mode power supply and replace them with (much less efficient) linear power supplies. You'd need a larger water-cooling system though.
    - hatsunearu 8y ago
      Is this a joke? That would require making your own GPU PCB, and maybe a year's worth of studying on electronics and power supply design.
      - cellularmitosis 8y ago
        Not really. More likely just desoldering a couple of key components and soldering in a few wires to a dsughterboard with a linear regulator. A year’s worth of power supply design? Have you looked at the LM7805 datasheet? The circuit is one regulator and two capacitors...
        magicalhippo 8y ago
        Have you looked at the current requirements for CPUs and GPUs? We're talking 100A or more. Even if the input was 3.3V, which it isn't, a linear regulator down to 1.1V would have to dissipate 220W or more. You'll need a bigger heatsink for the linear regulator than for the CPU... And designing a 250W-capable linear regulator is not as simple as just hooking up a LM7805. So with a modern CPU and GPU, your talking ~400W of power to the actual components, and nearly 500W wasted in the linear regulators. This of course also means you have to get a 1000W PSU as a bare minimum.
        hatsunearu 8y ago
        Here's the problem: not only do you have to dissipate 200W+ for your pass element, you need to drive it ultra fast with an extremely fast analog circuit that can withstand the massive magnetic fields (which pretty much means you need a PCB). Yeah and good luck driving a 200W linear element (if it even exists, lol) with a few op amps--the driver which should deliver a few amps into the gate/base of the pass element, which in and of itself is a pretty difficult challenge.
        hatsunearu 8y ago
        old thread but LMFAO you can't be any more wrong. You need /much/ more careful design to get GPU-compliant performance. The dI/dt on modern ASICs are insane, and you need an insane regulator to deal with it.
  - lutorm 8y ago
    I was going to say, I can hear coil whine if I stick my ear into the machine, but it doesn't make it out past the acoustic dampening panels in my case.
- diamondo25 8y ago
  I've had a GTX 460 and a GTX 660 Ti before, and once I upgraded to a GTX 970 i was disappointed by the coil whine. I could even see the effect of the power drain on my secondary screen when I booted up GTA 5. Guess we'll have to live with the fact that the tech cannot keep up with the demand and quality, resulting in more 'unstable' electronics.
corysama 8y ago
My 1080TI also has an obnoxious whine that precisely reflects activity on the card. On the upside, when I’m working in CUDA, I can listen to my algorithms and get a hint at how they are working :)
- flashman 8y ago
  Yeah I can tell by the various fans whether an application has crashed or the whole system.
developer2 8y ago
Coil whine with graphics cards is such a frustrating experience, because there is no informed consensus as to what the underlying cause truly is. Everyone has their own anecdotal reason: a) Maybe coil whine is an intrinsic factor in the manufacture of graphics cards, similar to dead pixels on displays. "Luck of the draw" when obtaining one is the only way to win. Cycle through RMAs until you get one with little to no coil whine. b) Or, it depends which company you buy from: each of Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac et al are supposedly better or worse than the others. c) Or, it's not a problem with the GPU at all; rather, it's an indication of a poor quality power supply (PSU). I've never seen an informed analysis from an industry engineer who has a goddamn clue what they are talking about. NVIDIA could probably enlighten us all with an exact-science explanation, but that seems unlikely. My uneducated guess is that the situation is closest to option 'a' above, and that rejecting units for coil whine during quality control would drastically reduce production yield.
- ovao 8y ago
  Yeah, I don’t see NVIDIA or AMD drawing any attention to product flaws, particularly if the end-user solution is “RMA until you get a good one”. Instead, ping a few review sites and see if any of them are willing to take a crack at it.

gambiting 8y ago

My fiancee has a mouse(Logitech MX Master) which has a very-high pitched coil whine, but only when you move it. It's the most infuriating thing in the universe, but apparently she can't hear it. So yes, random coil whine is about 10000x worse than fans.

0xfeba 8y ago
That's not the mouse, but the CPU causing coil whine when the mouses causes the kernel to up it's CPU usage as you fly across various GUI elements.
- mohn 8y ago
  Unless you've tested OP's fiancee's system yourself and found that to be the case, I wouldn't be so sure. I had a Logitech G500 with awful coil whine and the opposite problem: it would stop whining when moving and start when idle. I suspect it had to do with the power saving mode that lots of mice have, where the laser power supply ramps down to dim the laser illumination after a period of no detected motion.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  A lot of times I've noticed it's the USB controller. It's quite evident when you have headphone ports near USB ports.
  - sgtmas2006 8y ago
    I can be tabbed out and hear when I get into the plane in PUBG from the increase in whine. It's quite nice actually.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  Not necessarily. Possible, but I had a cheap HP mouse that whined briefly when it first came out of sleep mode. Couldn't have been the computer, since it would make the same noise when the PC was turned off.
- gambiting 8y ago