Electrical buzzing/cracking coming from brand new Sapphire HD 7970 GHz edition (Vapor-X)

[gazzy_g]

Good evening all,

I bought the titular graphics card from Overclockers UK just over a month ago, and I've noticed there's a weird electrical buzzing noise coming from the card.

This noise varies, but usually it's like a buzzing noise for almost all games. I've been told that you should expect capacitors to do that on graphics cards, but it does seem a bit loud at times.

It's worst when playing planetside 2, but fortunately once I'm in the game the loud fans drown it out - I'm happy with a loud fan noise as that's expected of a PC rendering a lot of stuff at once, buzzing shouldn't be there imho so annoys me. Just to explain that odd conflict of interests.

My first worry: It makes a crackling/buzzing noise even when I'm doing nothing at the desktop except looking on the internet. It's not audible unless I open the panel and listen relatively close by, but still... Is that normal?

The main issue:

There are two games where the sound is insanely loud, and it's a different sound. It seems to go from a buzzing to a loud electrical clicking type of noise, which like I say is much louder and doesn't sound as healthy. The games are SimCity 2013 (at all times, but loudest when playing a map), and during Total War: Shogun 2 cinematics (NOT ingame).

Why is it doing this for these games, and not for others? I tested FurMark at high settings and it doesn't make that noise. In FurMark it reacts the same as when playing Planetside 2, FarCry3 + Blood Dragon, Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider, albeit a bit of a louder and faster buzz that's still drowned out by the fans.

The noise seems to get even louder and faster if I set the framerate limit from "30" to "60" or "off" in SimCity, and changes slightly if I adjust the settings. Though I'm baffled as to why; Tomb Raider benchmarked at about 56FPS on highest settings, and as I said never makes that noise.

I've not tested it out with other games yet, but it just seems odd and worrying to me... Surely if it's going to go mental it would do it at Crysis 3 on full settings, not a cheesy city building game. I realise it's more CPU intensive, but surely that would make it easier on the GPU.

Please, any help you can provide I will massively appreciate. I'm really worried that something's wrong with my newly built PC. Unfortunately I barely got to test it for the first month so it's past the 30 days free replacement by a week or so, otherwise I'd have sent it back.

And apologies for the wall of text...

 

[NoobCannon]

Coil whine. Rma the card if it annoys you.

One of my 7970s does it but its such a good clocker i put up with it

You will find a vsynch helps, coil whine is usually in high fps sceneraos i.e menu/cinematic scenes or games where your card is producing high fps (cant imagine sim city being too taxing?) and vsynch reduces the effect.

Some people say looping haven valley can help coil whine but made no difference to mine

 

[tommybhoy]

Providing you have 2 PSU PCI-e cables, split the load from the PSU:

Splitting the load from the PSU stopped bad coil whine on a 7970 WF, it won't work for everyone, but some have had luck doing that.

 

[d_brennen]

GPUs should just come with a disclaimer - may squeal like a bitch.

I had a 5850 which would make a racket, even scrolling some websites. I game with headphones so it didn't bother me too much. After some months I noticed it had stopped for some reason, don't know why or when it happened

 

[gazzy_g]

Coil whine. Rma the card if it annoys you.

One of my 7970s does it but its such a good clocker i put up with it

You will find a vsynch helps, coil whine is usually in high fps sceneraos i.e menu/cinematic scenes or games where your card is producing high fps (cant imagine sim city being too taxing?) and vsynch reduces the effect.

Some people say looping haven valley can help coil whine but made no difference to mine

Cheers for the heads up NoobCannon, but VSync was already enabled in SimCity. Plus like I say it made that horrendous noise even at 30fps cap, and considering Tomb Raider ran at an average of about 58 I'm baffled why TR wasn't even worse for that noise. I'll have a look at that Haven Valley thing though .

Providing you have 2 PSU PCI-e cables, split the load from the PSU:

Splitting the load from the PSU stopped bad coil whine on a 7970 WF, it won't work for everyone, but some have had luck doing that.

Tried that and either it's a coincidence or the noise seems to be quieter! Still a lot louder than on the other games, and still concerning, but it seems to be at a tolerable level to play the game now. Thanks a tonne mate . I'll be keeping an eye on it to see if it recurs at that volume. I do have a lot more background noise in my house at the moment, but hopefully that's not masking it and your solution has indeed helped a lot!

Also cheers d_brennan, hopefully it'll pass with time.

Just to say I'm still baffled as to why it makes a different, louder, and more worrying noise with SimCity and the Shogun 2 cinematics than other very high end games at ultra settings. If anyone can offer insight into why it would be nice. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. I'd really like to know what it is and whether it's likely to be damaging my card (as it sounds different to the standard coil whine)

 

[oldestgregg]

Sim city,shogun and stalker COP all make that sound in the menus. If you change the fps in sim city from 60 to 30 it changes in tone. That was on my 7970s but I havnt tried it on my 780 yet.

 

[oldestgregg]

Quick check and sim city makes that sound on my 780 also!

 

[wazza300]

can also try disabling c1e in the bios,or intel speedstep or eist

should reduce or stop the noise,every gpu ive ever owned made a slight squeal in game menus,but not in the game itself

its mainly when the gpu is running 20000+ fps it creates the noise esp in game menus

another can be the motherboards/cpu power saving,a combination of gpu/mb/psu