9800X3D Noctua Build

[Nitefly]

Might be a silly question but have you set a frame rate limit in Nvidia Control Panel? They will often whine if they're pushing 500fps or something daft when you get to a menu if something non-taxing. Brand new 4080 Super did the same but it's not done it since I slapped an FPS limit in to match my screen's max refresh rate - no point in it ever rendering more frames than can be displayed!

Thanks buddy - yes, it’s whining when at 100% load even at low frames. It’s not horrendous, nowhere near as bad as the 4090s I had (and promptly returned!) - totally unacceptable that was!

 

[SpellowHouse]

The offsets arrived… seem very basic but hopefully do the job:

It’s never easy though is it…

The fans came with the rubber fasteners shown on the left below. The offsets came with the fasteners shown in the middle. But I also purchased the additional fasteners shown on the right:

This was because there fasteners that came with the fans / offsets have ‘screw heads’ (?!) that are simple too large the for the amount of room in front of the dust filters.

If you have a look here you’ll see what I mean… absolutely no room for them in that bottom space where the dust filter is held in place by a magnet:

Unfortunately my plan was thwarted… because there wasn’t even enough room for those. Arse! I ended up going with a combo of screws at the bottom and fasteners at the top:

Unfortunately, I also had to go with screws for the bottom fan in entirety for a completely seperate reason; the holes were too small for the rubber fasteners to bite onto. How annoying. Here you can see the screws holding the fans in place:

Sorting that out took ages… good job I’m not attempting it all in one day

I'm sure you already know this, but anything close to the suction side of the fan increases the noise the fan makes, and it really does make a lot of difference. I spent some time investigating the issue and have bought the Noctua spacers before.

It's always worth trying to use the fan where there is nothing close to the suction side, but that can't always be achieved.

The spacers do a good job, but they aren't ideal. The ideal space is actually about 20~25mm. What I did, on one build, was to use some old fans and completely remove the motor, blades and so on, so that they became 25mm spacers. You could do exactly the same in your build.

It only works for certain fans because you need to get screws in from both directions to hold everything together (that will only make sense when you try it.).

I also, commonly, Dremmel out the unused metal bars on the front of the case that support 120mm fans. It not only removes quite a lot of metal in the way of the fans, it also makes a noticeable impact on the noise they make.

Oh, and check, also, that any filters on the suction side are at least 20~25mm away from filters and use spacers if they aren't.

 

[Nitefly]

@SpellowHouse interesting, thanks for sharing

 

[Nitefly]

It’s all kicking off this afternoon! With the Noctua fan mount arriving tomorrow, I thought I might as well get on with operation ‘super glue’.

The approach to gluing is well documented here (if you go to the most recent posts you’ll see yours truly asking Qs like the noob I am):

How to quickly & easily fix coil-whine(coil choke noise)

A forum user recently asked about Coil Whine, which is the noise a choke coil sometimes makes as it operates. This is almost always a video card problem, but can happen on any other computer or electronics components employing a choke in it's circuitry, including motherboards & power supplies...

www.techpowerup.com

Here’s the chokes the were the targets (one on the backplate side):

Oh god oh god oh god…

Well… it was a mixed bag. No need to be proud, someone else can learn from my mistakes

I decided to be generous with the glue. These caps were thirsty… glug glug glug!! Slurp slurp!!

… hmm was I adding a bit too much… eh, not sure.

Yes, yes it was too much. Tilting the GPU resulted in a wave of glue heading towards the pcie header - nooooooo!!!

Fortunately, it never reached it: the SLI slot however was not so lucky. Pretty such that has been rendered unusable! Oh well!

I also tried clearing up excess glue with numerous items… cotton buds, good, alcohol wipes… not so good - caused instant ‘whitening’ of the glue so there are some marks on the board. Hopefully harmless.

It’s been drying for about an hour, but I’ll leave it a couple more before reassembly. Fingers crossed that I didn’t kill it

I also took the time to replace the thermal pads, using the GPU specific kit from Kritical Pads.

On closer inspection, this thermal pad from Gigabyte didn’t even cover everything it needed to… you’ll see the outline of where it sat - what a joke!

The new thermal pads are looking nice and neat - hopefully they perform well:

Glue is still drying… keep me in your prayers

 

[chaparral]

It’s been drying for about an hour, but I’ll leave it a couple more before reassembly. Fingers crossed that I didn’t kill it

Am just here waiting for the new thread to be posted "Help i glued my crossed fingers together"

Or the " Help I went to the Toilet with super glue on my hands "

 

[Cenedd]

You want to be sure it's dry before you put it anywhere near any plastic - particularly clear plastic - as it off-gasses that gas makes the plastic go cloudy. Really annoying if you've tried to glue something near a screen
Personally I like Mitre Fast as it's a bottle of suprr-glue with a can of spray. The spray makes it set instantly....for when you've got to go all-in. You can apply glue to one part and spray to another, touch them together and you have less than a second to get them in the right place once they touch.

Fingers crossed for your card.

 

[TrojanWhore]

I've heard of the glue fix for coil whine before, but had always assumed it was hot-glue or silicon sealant (...and was the result of high frequency vibration being the issue)... would assume superglue/cyanoacrylate would be too stiff/brittle!

 

[Nitefly]

You want to be sure it's dry before you put it anywhere near any plastic - particularly clear plastic - as it off-gasses that gas makes the plastic go cloudy. Really annoying if you've tried to glue something near a screen
Personally I like Mitre Fast as it's a bottle of suprr-glue with a can of spray. The spray makes it set instantly....for when you've got to go all-in. You can apply glue to one part and spray to another, touch them together and you have less than a second to get them in the right place once they touch.

Fingers crossed for your card.

Yup the card is definitely getting some cloudy residue around where the glue has been!

I've heard of the glue fix for coil whine before, but had always assumed it was hot-glue or silicon sealant (...and was the result of high frequency vibration being the issue)... would assume superglue/cyanoacrylate would be too stiff/brittle!

The ‘wisdom’ (from the forum link above) seems to be that very basic superglue - not any ‘loctite’ stuff that has addition compounds - is best because it naturally ‘wicks’ to where it needs to go to plug the gaps / keep things in place.

But I guess we’ll see when my card fails to turn on

I think I’m going to wait for this noctua bracket to arrive tomorrow and will shunt it all together before trying to turn it on…

 

[TrojanWhore]

Yeah, CA (cyanoacrylate) is basic 'superglue' as far as I'm aware (wasn't aware it was actually a brand name!
Makes sense that it would wick in to components better than a more viscous glue, as well as that 'hot' glue could potentially melt once in use.

Will be interested to hear your results with it anyway! I've basically accepted some degree of coil whine to be inevitable ever since clock frequencies went near/above 1GHz, or with higher (300+) framerates!

 

[Nitefly]

Yeah, CA (cyanoacrylate) is basic 'superglue' as far as I'm aware (wasn't aware it was actually a brand name!
Makes sense that it would wick in to components better than a more viscous glue, as well as that 'hot' glue could potentially melt once in use.

Will be interested to hear your results with it anyway! I've basically accepted some degree of coil whine to be inevitable ever since clock frequencies went near/above 1GHz, or with higher (300+) framerates!

In truth the coil whine from this card has always been acceptable to me as the PC has been behind my TV and music / fans have always put it out of earshot. It IS there though… just something I thought I’d attack if I was faffing around with this fan mod, since it’s now on my desk. Why not turbo it up… for the lols

Replacing the fans (as per my above posts in this thread where I swapped them for ‘effective copies’ of the originals) was a major improvement for me when it comes to noise I had the card mounted vertically for years, but now it’s horizontal as I wanted a ‘simple’ build… and it was very noisy when it moved to horizontal. Not sure if that had anything to do with it being vertical for a few years!

 

[pBay]

Good luck with it. I have ordered same pads which are en route and a toolkit. Thankfully mine doesn't have coil whine, it's just hotter than a fusion reactor when doing anything mildly taxing

Be interesting to see how bad my existing pads are when I open it up, shocking that coverage on yours

 

[Nitefly]

Good luck with it. I have ordered same pads which are en route and a toolkit. Thankfully mine doesn't have coil whine, it's just hotter than a fusion reactor when doing anything mildly taxing

Be interesting to see how bad my existing pads are when I open it up, shocking that coverage on yours

Good stuff! It’s fairly idiot proof - he says - just make sure you take lots of photos along the way of where the screws have come out of and where everything goes. When I tried to put it together once, the board was bending… what’s going on there?!

Turns out the right screws were in the right holes… but going the wrong way! Derp.

Oh and having screwdrivers that are magnetic really helps too

Other things you will need is thermal paste and something to get rid of old residue - I quite like the hassle free Noctua wipes personally, also use coffee filter paper which is quite good, I’m sure there’s plenty of other options.

Let me know how you get on

 

[pBay]

Good stuff! It’s fairly idiot proof - he says - just make sure you take lots of photos along the way of where the screws have come out of and where everything goes. When I tried to put it together once, the board was bending… what’s going on there?!

Turns out the right screws were in the right holes… but going the wrong way! Derp.

Oh and having screwdrivers that are magnetic really helps too

Other things you will need is thermal paste and something to get rid of old residue - I quite like the hassle free Noctua wipes personally, also use coffee filter paper which is quite good, I’m sure there’s plenty of other options.

Let me know how you get on

Oh yea I'm well prepared. Got my ifixit kit, isopropyl alcohol wipes, thermalright TFX paste. Just hope I bring the patience when I can't wrangle those fan headers loose!

 

[Nitefly]

Oh yea I'm well prepared. Got my ifixit kit, isopropyl alcohol wipes, thermalright TFX paste. Just hope I bring the patience when I can't wrangle those fan headers loose!

You’ll need a stiff drink to calm your rage after disconnecting that RGB header

If you’re not trying to access the fans, you could skip disconnecting the RGB header tbh, but you will need to disconnect that or the fan headers… see how you get on!

Edit: see my post here - in one pic (when I’m whinging about this subject) the RGB header is still connected.

Edit 2: hmm if you’re going to remove the backplate for the pads… it will probably be less fiddly to remove it than to not remove it.

 

[pBay]

You’ll need a stiff drink to calm your rage after disconnecting that RGB header

If you’re not trying to access the fans, you could skip disconnecting the RGB header tbh, but you will need to disconnect that or the fan headers… see how you get on!

Edit: see my post here - in one pic (when I’m whinging about this subject) the RGB header is still connected.

Thanks that helps. Did you have to disconnect the pcie power connectors to remove rear plate?

 

[Nitefly]

Thanks that helps. Did you have to disconnect the pcie power connectors to remove rear plate?

Sort of! The sensible way of doing it might be to disconnect the cables… but I actually unscrewed the sockets from the backplate which does the same job.

In this photo you I’ve circled the screws or the cables in red. You’ll need to go one way or the other. Screws was super easy.

Fan headers / cables in yellow.

RGB header / cable in blue.

 

[pBay]

Sort of! The sensible way of doing it might be to disconnect the cables… but I actually unscrewed the sockets from the backplate which does the same job.

In this photo you I’ve circled the screws or the cables in red. You’ll need to go one way or the other. Screws was super easy.

Fan headers / cables in yellow.

RGB header / cable in blue.

Excellent thanks. Will document my progress when pads show up.

 

[Nitefly]

Success!!! It didn’t die!!!

I did reassemble to give it a whirl before the noctua mod, in the end, just to assess the coil whine scenario. A silent fan card with just coil whine could be annoying as heck!

Did the glue solve the ‘coil whine’ though? Hmm, maybe a little? Not really though. I don’t think the stress / effort was worth the outcome in my case, but it really wasn’t a particularly noisy card to begin with.

The card is definitely cooler with the new thermal pads though. Ragging the GPU to 100% for 10 minutes and the hotspot didn’t exceed 85 degrees, not bad. Overall temps at 100% were still around 65 degrees, fine by me, and it was sat in the 20s at idle

@pBay after you’ve mounted your thermal pads, pay attention to how the backplate is sitting when you remount it, especially when you reassemble the whole thing and put pressure onto the thermal paste area. I think the pads are thinner but ‘less squishy’ than stock so there is scope for the backplate to bend very slightly with over-tightening. I doubt it’s an issue either way, just keep an eye out for it so that nothing extreme happens

In the end, the whine is totally ignorable when game music is playing so I decided to put a cork in my OCD and get on with the mod.

As expected, there’s absolutely zero chance of this kit actually mounting the card, which meant it was a case of lining everything up with my eyes, using the glue again and hoping for the best… no ability to remount the stock fans after this…. good lord, I don’t half put myself through it, do I?

I had to visualise whereabouts the fans should sit… needs to ‘look’ right to the eyes, but not sit so close to the motherboard that I couldn’t mount the card.

What followed one of of those “**** it” moments - glue deployed… lets gooooooo!

Turned out pretty damn good. My eyes didn’t let me down and it’s looking slick!

Just waiting for the glue to settle and will plug it all back together

 

[Nitefly]

Delayed following up on the results!

Card seems generally rock solid in games / benchmarks / stress testing but I am encountering scenarios where the monitor will dip on and off for a couple of seconds sporadically and infrequently, which is a minor nuisance - has happened on the desktop too, so it’s not when the card is stressed. Nothing obvious coming up in windows event viewer. Hard to know if this is related or whether it was happening before the mod as I just might have not been aware of it, but it is possible I caused this myself, somehow. Just trying to identify what is happening, process of elimination. It’s slow progress because I can be good for two hours gaming and then it happens.

Different cable and different ports are still have the same issue… monitor swap next… then probably reinstall windows… if it still happens well then I guess I borked it!

I’ll grab a 50 series card so not the end of the world even if that is the case, but so annoying trying to pin point what is happening. That’s having a PC for you!

Ideas / input welcome! Will say if I figure it out.

 

[Cenedd]

I think the only time I've seen that exact symptom turned out to be a faulty batch of monitors. It does seem too coincidental to be just after your open card surgery though - although still worth testing. You could always boot a live linux CD or memory stick rather than reinstall. If it happens in that too, you know it isn't the Windows install. Doesn't necessarily prove that it's Windows if it doesn't flicker as it's a very different setup but it's quick, easy and non-destructive.