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Coil whine at stock, and a smoking graphics card.

TechnoCorruption

TechnoCorruption

TechnoCorruption

Soldato
Joined
9 May 2005
Posts
2,511
To cut a long story short, bought a XFX 7950 Black Edition from a competitor which arrived Monday. Serious coil whine, as in louder than my NZXT Switch with 7 x 140mm on full. RMA'ed for refund so I could buy a MSI 7950 Twin Frozr from Overclockers and get it the next day.

Been in my system for two days absolutely fine. Thought I would try a run through of 3D Mark and in all my years of PC building I had my first case of a brown trouser moment. PC shuts down mid 3D Mark run, I instantly look at the computer to see a small puff of smoke rising from one of the 6 black resistors just to the left of the 6pin plugs.

Quickly got the power plug out and inspected the card, boring I know but there are no signs of burning, obviously I had to check to see if it still works which it doesn't. I have never been so nervous as I was of removing the card and moving my dvi cable to my trusty HD4000 input (pats HD4000)

Thankfully it booted and all seems fine. So my question is 3rd time lucky with a 7950 or should I maybe look at something else (Budget £250). This card did have some coil whine by the way but it was not as bad as the XFX and as I understand its quite common on the 7950. I was just going to do a burn in test overnight as some people said it cures it.

Never got round to it though as the card done a "burn in" test of its own :p
 
Coil whine was only when running high fps, crysis main menu was a big culprit as was running CSS bench mark at 295fps. Enabling vsync was enough to eliminate it. Have ordered a rma for refund for the card so that I can order something else today but after all this talk of coil whine and burning cards I must admit I am paranoid about the 7950's now.
 
Yeah, that's it. I agree that its the most annoying noise, seems all of the 7950 range suffer from it.

I don't really have many other choices at the £250 price range. I am leaning towards trying a 660TI, seems to be on par with the 7950 in most games, some a bit ahead, some a bit behind.
 
Jay85 said:
Might be a coincidence but i had a seasonic x850 before that made my gpu coil whine. I changed it to a corsair 600m and its been fine since. I did however RMA my seasonic psu directly back to seasonic hq as they were more willing to sort me out a replacment, no questions asked. As i know problems with coil whine on the psu part is hard to replicate at times.
Click to expand...

Doesn't seem to be as a bit of research pulled up other users with the same experiences. As far as coil whine goes it seems to be a bit of a lottery where certain power supply's (all makes and models seem to be vulnerable) clash with certain cards.

I am not really fussed with it anyway as long as its not too loud, there seems to be some people that have eliminated it completely by leaving the crysis 1 menu on screen overnight.

I have ordered another XFX 7950 (lost a bit of confidence in the MSI brand, I know that I was just unlucky to get a smoker but just playing it safe with a XFX) I had looked into getting something else, but it such a good card price/performance wise, I just couldn't say no to trying another one.
 
Just got my new XFX 7950 in, pleased to say its the best of all 3 for coil whine *punches air* with almost none at all. The only bit coming on when the menu of the valley benchmark comes up, the crysis 1 menu (worst culprit on other two cards) doesn't produce any at all.

Just so happy to have a good one, going to try a run of 3DMark now, lets hope there is no smoke like the MSI :p
 
My excitement has been very short lived. I cant believe what I have just seen after 5 minutes of 3DMark...




Artifacts :mad:

Booted up Crysis 1, artifacts!

Booted up Crysis 3, artifacts!

Dropped clocks from stock 900/1375 to 800/800, artifacts!

Even though max temps were only 62c, thought bump the fans up to 100% and guess what I saw, yep that's right artifacts! :mad:
 
Thought to myself whats the golden rule of pc repair when all else fails.

A reboot.

Just played 10 minutes of Crysis 1 & 3 and done a full 3DMark run :confused:

Maybe some leftover crap from the drivers and the fact I have had 3 different 7950's in there in a week may have messed something up?
 
Looks like its problem solved, must have been some files left over from the past two 7950 installs. I uninstalled drivers and then used a driver sweeper to get rid of all ati files. There were quite a few tucked away in windows/system. Reinstalled drivers and all seems well, had a few more 3DMark runs and some Crysis and not one artefact, yay! :D

One thing that I did notice which could be coincidence or it could mean something, but when I installed the first and second 7950 the screen didn't flash during the driver install and it prompted for reboot when compete. This time on the third 7950 the screen did flash during install with no prompt to reboot, I did reboot anyway but there was no prompt and I wondered why.

After the driver sweep and the most recent driver install, it was back to no screen flash and prompt for reboot.

So glad its working though :D
 
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