Sapphire Vega 64 NITRO+ Coil Whine

[xMesa]

OK guys. Back with more info.

Yes the Sapphire Vega64 Nitro+ has some coil whine. I've discovered it when playing Frostpunk, which is a city building sim.
The problem is with Frostpunk itself apparently on the first part. It's been reported that it has very bad optimization and uses as much VRAM as it can use.

After searching for a ton of stuff i found this suggestion:

Try those settings mate and let us know how it goes.

Bear in mind if you play old games like Elder Scrolls online, SWG, right click where it says State 7 Max and select "Minimum"
But I would advice to make profiles for those games and not do it on the generic profile as it will keep the clocks high even on desktop.

Which improves the performance of the Vega 64 quite a lot according to 3DMark. https://imgur.com/a/mtLnNGh

Now the Sapphire part of the problem. Indeed the card has coil whine.
At 99% utilisation of GPU and VRAM is decently loud and surpasses the fan noise.
In Witcher 3 with FULL details (+Freesync & VSync but w/o the nvidia hair stuff) it only goes up to 30-50% gpu load or so. And the coil whine is not that harsh.

Anyway because of RMAing this card will cost me ~90 GBP to send it to UK and back, i will keep it for a while.

 

[GothicGhost]

Sorry so you're not the UK ?
I don't see why you're paying shipping to send back a faulty product?

I thought the shop should cover the cost?

 

[kinggoose1]

Thanks for posting the suggestion. I tried the settings and can't tell any different in the amount of coil whine it's producing. I'm going to go down the route of returning the card.

 

[xMesa]

Sorry so you're not the UK ?
I don't see why you're paying shipping to send back a faulty product?

I thought the shop should cover the cost?

I doubt they are paying for the shipping. I'm not from the UK. I've already payed 40GBP for shipping when i got the card in the first place. If shipping is payed by OCUK for RMA then i will send it for RMA on Monday. Where do i check?

Thanks for posting the suggestion. I tried the settings and can't tell any different in the amount of coil whine it's producing. I'm going to go down the route of returning the card.

Yes it does not improve the coil whine but it does improve performance.

 

[Simon D]

I doubt they are paying for the shipping. I'm not from the UK. I've already payed 40GBP for shipping when i got the card in the first place. If shipping is payed by OCUK for RMA then i will send it for RMA on Monday. Where do i check?



Yes it does not improve the coil whine but it does improve performance.

I would post in the ocUK customer service section and ask, but coil whine is very subjective and does depend on setup.

If possible I suggest you record and make a video showing the coil whine to them.

I have found in the past some companies will refund postage if the goods are faulty, best to talk to them.

 

[xMesa]

I will record a video of the coil whining.

I've also sent a e-mail to a dude from OcUK Support which sent me the RMA confirmation asking about shipping costs.

I will come back when i have more info.

 

[Simon D]

I will record a video of the coil whining.

I've also sent a e-mail to a dude from OcUK Support which sent me the RMA confirmation asking about shipping costs.

I will come back when i have more info.

Have you tried running your PC system at default settings if it any better?

 

[kinggoose1]

I'd say with so many of us experiencing the same issue, all with different set-ups, this coil whine is less subjective, and more a fault with the product.

 

[Nasher]

Limit the FPS to 80-90 and it will go away. You won't notice more FPS over that amount anyway.

There is no guarantee you won't get it on another card. They are all using the same type of coils from the same manufacturers.

 

[kinggoose1]

Then what was the point in buying a vega 64? May as well have just got a rx 580 for less then half the cost... And also, it's been fairly conclusively proven that you can see fps difference past those numbers.

 

[meikj]

I ran Heaven overnight while I slept, so a good 10 hour stress. Still hearing coil whine. I will run it again overnight just to give it another stress since 24hrs seems recommended. I think from how bad it was initially there has been *some* improvement, but still audible and annoying. If I'm still experiencing it tomorrow, then I will need to think about where to go from there, because I'm not sure if I can stomach paying £399 for a card that continuously and at varying frequencies whines while I play games. I understand that coil whine is normal to an extent, I've had a 7950 before which had coil whine during high FPS situations (like menus, Unigine credits screen, etc.), but never during actual normal game play. My FPS is well within normal range of gaming and in games like The Witcher 3 is capped, so to hear it even then is hard to accept.

I think to RMA it would be last resort because I am happy with the performance of the card. However, if this card had been described to me as having audible coil whine during gaming, I would not have bought it. I use open back headphones so the noise from my computer is an extremely important factor to my PC gaming experience.

 

[Nasher]

Then what was the point in buying a vega 64? May as well have just got a rx 580 for less then half the cost... And also, it's been fairly conclusively proven that you can see fps difference past those numbers.

Minimum FPS is the point and that is what makes the biggest difference to how smooth it looks.

 

[jigger]

Then what was the point in buying a vega 64? May as well have just got a rx 580 for less then half the cost... And also, it's been fairly conclusively proven that you can see fps difference past those numbers.

Maybe half a percent of the population could notice a difference past 90 FPS. Those that could would notice input latancy a lot more.

But yeah why pay so much money to limit the performance. If you're not happy just return the thing. I haven't noticed any coil noise from mine.

 

[xMesa]

I received the answer for the shipping from outside of UK question.

"As you are outside of the UK shipping to us would be at your expense, but we would send out the replacement free of charge."

So if i send it for RMA for the replacement of it, it only costs 1-way.

I agree this looks like a fault with the product. This seems a lot more common with this Vega 64 model.
I will probably send it for RMA on Monday and if the replacement does the same thing i'll keep it for a while then sell it second-hand.
That's all i can do. Will post feedback if RMA-ing and replacing it with another card solved the coil whine.

EDIT: i've searched for "coil whine" in the Vega64 owners thread, and i got back 4 pages of results. Most people reporting the issue on the recently bought Vega64 Nitro+ from black friday sale. It seems that this is really a product issue rather then anything else.

EDIT2: Now the risk-benefit of sending it back for RMA. The risk is i pay ~40 GBP to send it back and if i receive the same card, it might have the same problem. What to do... what to do... I'm leaning towards sending it back and praying that even if the new one has coil whine, it's not worse. It's worth the risk? What would you guys do?

 

[kinggoose1]

How are you contacting them? No one has replied to my post in the customer service section that I posted yesterday.

For me, I'm going to send this one back and either go for the strix vega and just deal with the high temps (I bought a freesync monitor because I got this gpu so...), or see if I can get a cheap 580 somewhere and save up till I have enough for a much better GPU or for Navi, whichever comes first.

 

[xMesa]

I contacted them about the RMA on Friday using the webnote form here: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/webnote.php then i just replied to the e-mail received.

 

[GothicGhost]

I would send it back for a refund and get something else.

 

[Panos]

OK guys. Back with more info.

Yes the Sapphire Vega64 Nitro+ has some coil whine. I've discovered it when playing Frostpunk, which is a city building sim.
The problem is with Frostpunk itself apparently on the first part. It's been reported that it has very bad optimization and uses as much VRAM as it can use.

After searching for a ton of stuff i found this suggestion:



Which improves the performance of the Vega 64 quite a lot according to 3DMark. https://imgur.com/a/mtLnNGh

Now the Sapphire part of the problem. Indeed the card has coil whine.
At 99% utilisation of GPU and VRAM is decently loud and surpasses the fan noise.
In Witcher 3 with FULL details (+Freesync & VSync but w/o the nvidia hair stuff) it only goes up to 30-50% gpu load or so. And the coil whine is not that harsh.

Anyway because of RMAing this card will cost me ~90 GBP to send it to UK and back, i will keep it for a while.

Reduce power by another 25mv and lower PL to 30%.

 

[meikj]

So I stressed it for another night with Heaven just to try and properly 'break it in'. Still experiencing pretty audible coil whine, so I think I have to accept this. With that said, I'll probably return it because not only will it drive me insane, but it's disgusting to pay £399 for a card that whines so bad.

I have uploaded a video to try and convey how bad this coil whine is (showing starting up of benchmark with no coil whine so you can contrast):

 

[Davedree]

Typical vega coil buzz unfortunately.
I'd send it back, as you clearly can't put up with it, and it won't get better over time. Also when you try and sell it will put people off buying it.

Here's my reference from last year, still the same a year on, but it's not as loud as yours.
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/is-this-acceptable-coil-buzz.18802805/