• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Do nvidia cards still have that horrendous choke hiss?

There's slight whine on my Titans but only when rendering over 170fps or so and it really is minimal. The ASUS 290x I had did have horrendous coil whine. The worst I've heard in a long time. It's hit and miss though and frankly I wouldn't RMA a card on the basis of coil whine alone though. It's not a fault.

Remember its worse in some systems than others as it varies depending on the load on the PSU. I found personally that power supplies with independent rails are more prone to it as they're normally under slightly more load and in turn makes the cards louder (for whatever reason). Just live with it.
 
Last edited:
It's a design problem, blaming PSU's is mostly just a convenient excuse fanboys use to deflect blame from the card in question.

The 7990 for example is notorious for it:

http://www.techngaming.com/home/editorial/amd-ruins-new-flagship-1000-hd-7990-graphics-card-with-annoying-coil-whine-r781 said:
The noise problem stems from underdamped resonance affecting the card's onboard power regulation circuitry when it's heavily loaded by the GPU. Extra load or strain is put on the circuitry when the card goes into 3D mode and the GPU clock and voltage, increase as the card revs up to its full potential. This causes an effect called microphony where the components physically vibrate in sympathy to the varying high electric current running through them.

In a poorly designed circuit, the vibrations will be large enough that the coils, forming a central part of the power circuitry, vibrate excessively making a highly irritating noise. On top of that, the noise tends to vary significantly according to the load imposed by the GPU, which various from second to second as it renders a changing 3D scene (usually a game) ramping the annoyance. In a well designed circuit, these vibrations will be under tight control, not allowing them to build up enough to be audible under even the greatest load. One way to address this is to use higher powered components which are never stressed to anywhere near their limits, for example.
Click to expand...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-review-benchmark said:
Unfortunately, though, more taxing applications trigger the whining issue that creates more noise than the fans.

What AMD refers to as capacitor and PCB vibration ends up costing the Radeon HD 7990 its theoretical advantage. It’d be great to see AMD fix this and really redefine what it means to sell a flagship dual-GPU card that barely makes a whisper.
Click to expand...

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/24.html said:
A really big, glaring issue is the AMD HD 7990's loud coil whine. It is very noisy, audible throughout the whole room, especially at high framerates. What makes it even worse is that the pitch and volume keep changing all the time, so you will find it distracting, noticing it more than its fan noise. I asked five other colleagues and they all confirmed the card's coil whine issue, so it's not just my sample.

AMD suggests enabling V-Sync to lock the card in at 60 FPS, which would result in less coil noise, but doing so still has the card produce very noticeable coil whine, especially due to it changing frequencies. I'm also sure most of you want to game with as many FPS as possible after spending all that money on a graphics card, not just the 60 FPS you could just as well achieve with a cheaper option.

NVIDIA's GTX 690 and GTX Titan both barely have any coil noise, no matter what the FPS rates are, which tells me that this is a solvable engineering problem. NVIDIA did a much better job here.
Click to expand...

Other high end AMD cards tend to be hit and miss and you're also more likely to get it on reference designs. NVidia cards are not completely immune but they do seem to have reduced it considerably.
 
All modern graphics cards have coil whine.. end of story :) There's a slim chance you'll get one which is worse than normal. If you got 6 in a row then its just regular coil whine which some people don't take notice of.
 
mmj_uk said:
It's a design problem, blaming PSU's is mostly just a convenient excuse fanboys use to deflect blame from the card in question.

Other high end AMD cards tend to be hit and miss and you're also more likely to get it on reference designs. NVidia cards are not completely immune but they do seem to have reduced it considerably.
Click to expand...

So seems the shoe is now on the other foot.

Do any 290x owners have any audiable whine?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom