[Sury]

Please bear with me, while I explain my situation, its a bit long winded.. but it's wired.

So just yesterday I started getting this coil whine from my graphics card (not high pitched squealing), it's not a new card I have had it running in my system since 2015 and it is water cooled so no fans are on the card.
I know it is coming from my GPU, after testing my system with just onboard graphics and no other component was making a sound.

Now I know you can't do anything about coil whine, but what is really wired is that it's happen when system is idle!
As soon as I interact with windows whether it's opening up folders go going into settings etc... it stops for a split second before it's back.
What's really bizarre is when I open up any browser (no web page loaded), it goes dead quiet, like the coil whine wasn't even there.
Browse some webpages and the whine is back, but not as loud.

Tested it in a couple of games (5min test) and coil whine was present in 1 game FPS locked at 60, but not as loud as when system is idle. The other game I tested had no FPS lock, so I could hear the whine below 60FPS, but as soon at FPS was between 80-160 it was dead quiet.
When game play was at a certain scene, FPS just went up well pass 160-230 even though before in the same place it wasn't doing that FPS. At this point I would hear the high pitched squealing from the capacitors I presume and I could hear some coil whine again.

Exit the game and back at the desktop and the coil whine is gone.
While typing this out I went back to the desktop a couple of times and no whine, now when I am about to submit this post the whine is back.
 

I am thinking that it might have something to do with the PSU voltages, it seems when ever there is no load on the GPU the whine is very present and annoying. Put a little bit of a load on GPU and it goes a bit quieter or out right quiet like it use to be for the last 4yrs.

Anyone had an experience like this or know of a way I could do something to get ride of this annoying sound?
FYI I don't know that much about PSU voltages etc... but ran GPU-Z and logged the results (before game play) and there was no bouncing around of voltages.
 

[LinuxUser]

That is strange.

 

I know that coil whine can be affected by load, but it'd usually be affected consistently and probably increasing with load. And I'm not sure why it would have only started happening recently. But I'm not sure how something like PSU voltage would cause it, nor how that would happen abruptly. I guess PSU ripple might contribute, but once again I'm not sure how that would get significantly worse abruptly without major PSU problems or outright failure.

 

When game play was at a certain scene, FPS just went up well pass 160-230 even though before in the same place it wasn't doing that FPS. At this point I would hear the high pitched squealing from the capacitors I presume and I could hear some coil whine again.

 

Could there be any difference in the gameplay that made the difference, or is something weird going where something isn't rendering properly and therefore rendering much faster? I'm pretty certain that I've read that coil whine and such can happen more on high-framerate situations (e.g. menus), so it does make sense that you could hear something then.

 

Are you overclocking? Have you recently updated drivers? Any other recent changes? What are the graphics card temperatures like, especially for the VRM?

[Sury]

I have a Gigabyte G1 980Ti, so out of the box it is slightly overclocked from the manufacture.
No recent new driver updates. I did test different drivers, old ones and latest one from Nvidia, made no difference. And yes I did use DDU, when uninstalling drivers.

GPU sits are around a 21c-25c at idle...

I just hooked up another PSU, just to the GPU.. and sadly still have the whine.

So it's definitely the GPU.

I did read some other people had coil whine when system was idling, but all of them reported that they had just built their pcs recently, so they were just going to RMA the card.. my 4yrs is well past that period.

This sucks.. technically nothing is broken.. but what a first world problem to have.
I am on my pc everyday (work pc & gaming), half the time I have music going so the noise would be drowned out, but the rest of time I do things in silences so it's not going to be pleasant.
Had to take a client phone call, so I had to open a browser window just to silences the whining... as it was so distracting.

This coil whine is really bad, it's not high pitched it's more of a eeeeerrrrrrrrr sound.
Wish it was like normal coil whine at high loads... this one is just odd... makes me wonder if my card is on it way out and it's whining about it lol.

Edited by Sury, 04 October 2019 - 01:11 PM.

[LinuxUser]

Sorry for the slow reply, I must have missed checking yesterday evening and also this morning...

 

Coil whine is normally high pitched, due to the switching frequency of the voltage regulator rather than anything about the coils themselves. If it wasn't water cooled I'd say it was a fan, but that isn't an option and there isn't really anything else except coil whine. So even more strange.

 

Pretty much the only thing I can think of is a partial VRM failure. What do the VRM temps do under load? And what about stability with a stress test?

[Sury]

My card doesn't have temp sensors for the VRMs, so can not monitor it.

Haven't done a stress test yet, have had a busy weekend.
However I did do a couple hours of solid gaming on Friday night and I found the noise to be very muted or non-existent, even browsing sites afterwards and leaving the pc idle on the desktop the noise was very very faint.
Yesterday I did the same thing, couple hours of gaming and the noise is very soft.
Today it's back but again not as loud, I would say it's now at a level which I could live with.

 

I always thought coil was high pitched and then I watched a video from jayzTwoCents in my research and he had a radeon card which was making a similar noise to mine, so I assumed that coil whine didn't have to always be high pitched.
I do hear a muted sound when scrolling up and down a page.. so it must be something to do with the power.

Edited by Sury, Today, 09:02 AM.

[LinuxUser]

Stranger and stranger! I hope it stays reasonable...