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High pitched buzzing/whining

Ewaf

Ewaf

Ewaf

Soldato
Joined
22 May 2007
Posts
3,932
Hi,

I've noticed that when playing a game, my GPU seems to emit a high pitched buzzing/whining that sounds mechanical, and when I alt tab the sound stops. Any idea what this could be?

Using MSI HD 7950 Twin Frozr III Boost Edition 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card **NEW REVISION**
 
coil whine?

can be caused by high frames per second,emi leakage from psu/mb/gpu

sometimes turning off the motherboard power saving helps lessen the noise as does enabling vsync in games
 
It's coil whine.

The higher the FPS the higher pitched it sounds. Enabling vsync can help sometimes as it reduces the load on the gpu (assuming it doesn't need full power to reach your monitors refresh rate) It can cause pretty noticeable input delay though so a lot of people hate it.

Coil whine is its worst in game menus where the gpu is allowed run 100% load while rendering thousands of fps. It is always there to some extent but its loudness and tone depends on a mixture of the gpu load/frame rate output and the graphics card itself.

Nothing much you can do unless its abnormally loud but this is rarely the case. You could do what I did and try change the graphics card, motherboard and power supply.......several times, only for it to make no difference whatsoever. Or you could try to ignore it.
 
sounds like coil whine, perfectly normal process when the gpu is under stress i.e gaming.

Some cards have worse coil whine than others, but from what ive read AMD cards like the 7900 series have it worse than the nvidia counterparts.
 
Ah I see, as long as it doesn't mean anything is broken that's fine. I use headphones so can't hear it, only noticed when going to toilet.

Thanks for the help.
 
You can reduce it by doing whatever you do that makes it sound the loudest. Then leave it like that for 24 hours. It normally gets better over time and in some cases with disappear completely. If its really bad and never gets better you can always RMA it though.
 
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