Is capacitor whine more likely with Nvidia cards?

[John Doe]

Never had it on any of my nVidia cards or for that matter any videocard used here - and we get through a lot.

Thanks for the heads up.

I use head phones so the only whine i hear is the wife. seriously couldn't say my 8800 has that. 2morrow i'll tell you if there is on the 4890

Cheers for checking.

 

[titaniumx3]

I've gotten the whine on my X1900XT, HD4870 and HD4890.

It primarily happens during scenes with extremely high fps, which usually means menus and video sequences. For example in the Stalker menu it whines a lot and the fps there is over 1200. The same applies to the Crysis menu and pretty much any 3D rendering task, where the fps is very high.

Also, the higher the fps, the higher the pitch of the whine, hence probably why you can't hear it under typical gaming scenarios.

Lastly, outside of 3D rendering, I have actually heard the whining when using certain windwos applications, in particular something that is displaying some sort of graphics. For example, if I'm scrolling through website with a lot of graphics (e.g. the hi-res screenshot thread in the PC games section) I get a faint whine (more like a high pitched buzz). The weird thing though is that I get the whine when using Internet Explorer, but not with Firefox.

 

[Phatzy]

i thought them 4890 got them new anti coil whine thingies.

I use head phones so the only whine i hear is the wife. seriously couldn't say my 8800 has that. 2morrow i'll tell you if there is on the 4890

haha in my case its the mum "clean your room" "get your dinner, tea" etc.

 

[The Asgard]

Cap/Coil squeal is common on both Nvidia and ATI. May be more so on ATI. It's not just your graphics. The PSU and Motherboard will also Squeal. A combination of Motherboard, PSU and graphics card can cause a sort of inductive resonance.

With my current setup combined with a Seasonic 750 M12D I get no squeal which is a first for me.

 

[kerrgreg]

my 4890 whines slightly when it does 3d rendering but not when playing games so thats fine.

 

[Sasahara]

Cap/Coil squeal is common on both Nvidia and ATI. May be more so on ATI. It's not just your graphics. The PSU and Motherboard will also Squeal. A combination of Motherboard, PSU and graphics card can cause a sort of inductive resonance.

With my current setup combined with a Seasonic 750 M12D I get no squeal which is a first for me.

+1 Envy point

 

[CurlyWhirly]

I've never heard capacitor whine - is it loud

If I was playing a game, would it be distracting

 

[John Doe]

Wow, I would just like to say thank you again for all the responses, it's been very helpful.

 

[Squakingcow]

I've never heard capacitor whine - is it loud

If I was playing a game, would it be distracting

Most of the time it is audible, however not loud enough to be annoying and most of the time cannot be heard over the sound from your speakers. Although some people have complained about having cards with particularly bad squeal that is unbearably loud.

 

[MikeHunt79]

I'm not really sure, I'm still new to all of this. Anything that causes the whine really.

I've come across coil whine before but not cap whine. Coil whine in various power supplies is caused by high switching frequencies that are going thru various inductors/coils which cause the coils to act like a small speaker. The coil is shacking very quickly, not good really...

This can happen on motherboards and gfx cards because of thier onboard power regulators.

Coil whine can be fixed by preventing the movement of the coil, and this should be done my the manufacturer really, not the end-user.

I guess it's put luck if you get a whiney gfx card or motherboard, if I got one I'd RMA it as it shouldn't whine, and may even get worse if the metal in the coil loosens up over time.

If you get a 2nd hand gfx card or motherboard which whines, there are ways of fixing it, hot glue would be a start...

 

[thegoonden]

I've only heard it on any card when the FPS goes through the roof (like 100's of FPS). As long as you have a standard monitor, and vsync to limit the FPS to those that the monitor can display, there should be no problem except in benchmarking runs.
(and for the "i can see the difference above 60" brigade, trust me, 70fps or 100fps looks foul compared to a vsync'd 60, for reasons I'm bored with explaining.


Overall power consumption seems unrelated to squeal, you get more squeal with something really basic runing at $BIGNUM FPS than you will from something that is REALLY heavy on the GPU doing a much lower framerate.

 

[MikeHunt79]

Overall power consumption seems unrelated to squeal, you get more squeal with something really basic runing at $BIGNUM FPS than you will from something that is REALLY heavy on the GPU doing a much lower framerate.

Interesting, perhaps the higher framerate is causing something to operate at higher than normal frequency which is causing the coils to shake...?

Really things like this should be checked before leaving the factory, it's not acceptable really...

 

[nomadd]

I've read that ATI have made strides in attempting to eliminate this from their more recent cards, whilst Nvidia haven't, is this true? If this is true, how common is it, and do certain Gtx200 cards tend to suffer from it more than others?

If it is relatively rare than I can accept the risk? Sorry, I know it's a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string type question'.

Well, I'll throw in my experiences for what it's worth...

Last upgrade I did was about a year ago. Tried an upper mid-range Nvidia card - as I'd used NV's cards for about the last 5 years - and the 'whine' (coils) drove me mad. Sorry, can't remember the exact card I tried as I sent it back after 1 day. Anyway, got a full refund. It was fine in 2D mode (i.e. Windows Desktop), but was really annoying in games (esp. Crysis and Orange Box.)

Went for a 4870 a few weeks later. It's been absolutely fine. No whine. Having said that, you have to do a fair amount of tweaking with the ATI fan controls to reduce the fan noise to something sensible whilst gaming. Either that, and/or change the fan. So I guess you can't win no matter which way you go!

Started doing most of my gaming these days on the XBOX360. Even there, you need to use the updated dash to get the "install game to hard drive" to get rid of the racket from the DVD drive...

Nomadd

 

[CraigN]

my old 4870x2 had this very bad new one doesnt.

MY GTX 260 doesnt have it either

 

[gurusan]

sounds like it's pretty random then.

 

[Jono8]

my new gtx 275 has it and so did my 8880gtx. Only happnes when games load ro there is a ridiculously high fps (like in menus/atitool e.t.c.). Doesnt bother me one bit. It's quite quiet.

 

[CurlyWhirly]

Most of the time it is audible, however not loud enough to be annoying and most of the time cannot be heard over the sound from your speakers. Although some people have complained about having cards with particularly bad squeal that is unbearably loud.

Thanks for that

 

[kylew]

It's a problem that effects both ATi and nvidia cards. I don't think you could really say one is more effected than the other really.

Even then the problem is quite rare I think, I've never had capacitor squeal with any of my cards, I've had it one with a PSU though.

 

[Shocky-FM]

No, they both do it, some more then others, luck of the draw regardless of which you buy.

 

[Minstadave]

http://vr-zone.com/articles/-new-article-/7113.html?doc=7113

"According to MSI, the yellow Solid State Chokes (SSC) is new on this card. As traditional choke has different parts inside (housing, coil, ferrite stick), it will generate high frequency noise under heavy load because of vibration. For SSC, it is made up of iron chunk with coil buried inside so there is no different parts thus it doesn't cause the buzzing noise anymore. Also, it can increase power density."