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How common is Coil Whine?

I last had a bit on my previous 5700 XT, that was made worse by the case at the time and my decision to have intake below and outtake at the top, so sound escaped more easily.

Now with a more silent case design and on the 3070 FE I've not heard any coil whine. With reports of new AMDs cards suffering with coil whine there's no way I'm touching them. If I had a card that had it again it would be returned.
 
I must be so dam lucky, I have never had coil whine on any card be it Nvidia or AMD going back years! 3 x 3090 no coil whine, 2 x 6900xt no coil whine. 2080ti no coil whine. Radeon VII no coil whine. Titan, no coil whine.
makes me wonder if some of the coil whine is more PSU based. some times hard to detect which it is.
 
Dave2150 said:
Depends how old you are. Lots of coil whine is in the higher frequency spectrum, where it's the most annoying. Plenty of folk 40+ that have lost 30-50% of their hearing, many either don't realize this or they are in denial.

Test you hearing here >

I've used around 6 3080 and 3090's in total and currently have a 4090. All have coil whine in some form. My strix 4090 is quieter, but still audible.
Click to expand...
That’s a amazing.
 
50s - could hear up to 13000Hz

My 3090FE whines like a Brummie F1 driver.
Never been bothered by another GPU. Can't hear my Inno3D 4090 at all.
 
Never had coil whine on a GPU, had it once on a EPOX MB that made super loud chirps, that said I game at 60Hz with v-sync. I do bench new parts to test them but after that don't bother.
 
My 6700XT has quite noticable coil whine where as my 3070 does not, but this is only something that is apparent if you run them in a case on the desk right next to you, which I don't do so it makes no real difference to me. My old 1080Ti had more notcaible coilwhine than both though and louder fans in general and it was pretty quiet one as it goes (MSI Twin Frozer) but again I'm one of these terrible people who put their case on the floor and I do that mostly to minimise noise from it.
 
Dave2150 said:
Depends how old you are. Lots of coil whine is in the higher frequency spectrum, where it's the most annoying. Plenty of folk 40+ that have lost 30-50% of their hearing, many either don't realize this or they are in denial.

Test you hearing here >

I've used around 6 3080 and 3090's in total and currently have a 4090. All have coil whine in some form. My strix 4090 is quieter, but still audible.
Click to expand...

I think what people are using to listen to it should be noted also :p

That was completely inaudible in the lowest range with crappy earbuds in but not with less crappy headphones on.
 
My history with coil whine on cards over the last few generations:

980 (PNY): None
1080 Ti (FE): Loads
2080 Ti (Palit): Moderate
3090 (Palit): A tiny bit in certain circumstances
4090 (Inno3D): None

So all over the show, really. I know other people with the same cards/AIBs who have had different results. Bit of a lottery.
 
1080 Gigabyte was terrible.. ended up with Asus Strig 1080 that is super quite.. same PSU!

Why is coil whine even a thing now.. especially at these prices.. they really are taking the **** on what components they use for some of these boards for this to be happening imo.
 
Koogle said:
...Why is coil whine even a thing now...
Click to expand...
I would say it's because there's no money in it, but for manufacturers to be sure that is the case, there would have to have been at least one card marketed with "No Coil Whine!" as a prominent feature, to compare with. I don't remember that ever happening.
 
the boards havent gotten much bigger but we are jamming 200-600+ watts through them, not worth spending to stop the problem is how i imagine they see it
 
Anything that is switching 250+ watts 60+ times a second is going to whine, if it bothers you - buy the most powerful card you can e.g. 3090 / 4090 and turn the power limit down until the whine stops, on my 3090 this was around 250 watts and still got 90% performance.
*Note - 60 times a second is a bit conservative, you might actually find you can silently switch 300+ watts 60 times a second.. but on a high hz monitor you have no chance.
 
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Late said:
So as the title suggests, I want to know how common it is for a GPU to have coil whine among the people in this forum.
In the past few years I have been using; RTX 2060, HD 7770, RX 590, RX 5700 xt and recently both an RX 6750 xt & RX 6700.
All cards have had pretty audible coil whine, which in the past was pretty easy to ignore as the case fans were loud.
But now, upgrading to Arctic's P12 it's too noticeable.
So how many of y'all have had very loud coil whine?
Click to expand...

I've got to say, did you try swapping out the PSU? The only time I had it (a GTX 1080) it howled like a banshee but the PSU took a turn for the worse not long after I'm inclined to think the two are related. Never seen it since in regular use. That being said you will get whine if you have ridiculously high FPS in menus say, always limit to something close to maximum monitor refresh rate anything over is wasted effort on the gpu's part.
 
The 3090's were pretty prone to it, i had 2 FE's with coil whine which was pretty bad, a 6800 which had awful coil whine too.

I went zotak for my 4090 as the 3090 zotak was the only one i tried out of about 5 that didnt have horrible coil whine, fortuantely no coil whine on that. i went through 3 different power supplies in that time too trying to eliminate everything because it was so loud on the FE's when the frame rate was high.
 
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