Strange 6950 noises

[Garee]

Whenever I play Half Life : Episode 2 a really strange noise seems to be coming from my ATI 6950. The sound itself is dynamic in that it will change if say I fire a gun, reload, jump etc

In game audio seems to be fine and the original Half Life 2 doesn't seem to have this problem. It also happens with Crysis and only seems to appear when rendering 3D as if I alt-tab to the desktop the noise will go away.

I load up Civ 5 and there is no problem.

Any ideas?

 

[Mean Mr Mustard]

Is it like a whining sort of noise? If so, could be inductor whine/capacitor whine/call it what you will whine.

Try enabling vsync if you haven't already, that may get rid of it.

 

[Garee]

Is it like a whining sort of noise? If so, could be inductor whine/capacitor whine/call it what you will whine.

Try enabling vsync if you haven't already, that may get rid of it.

Wow - That worked.

Is there anything I can do to fix the problem or do I have to use V-Synch in all my games now?

Thanks again.

 

[Mean Mr Mustard]

I've read about solutions involving putting blobs of hot glue on the inductor coil to stop it vibrating (this is what causes the whine) but not many people are happy to take their card apart and put glue on it (me included).

Personally, I'd stick with the vsync method.

 

[spirits247]

Also make sure it's your 6950 - sometimes the PSU or motherboard is to blame for coil whine.

Many modern cards seem to do it with really high FPS - 3Dmark03 where FPS go into their 1000's makes a noise on most cards I've tried! V-Sync or simply ramping up the settings to lower the FPS helps a lot in most cases.

If it's really bad, you could always ask for a replacement but there no gurantee the next will be any different.

 

[Garee]

Unfortunately the noise has started again. My card was flashed to a 6970 so I switched bios to the original 6950 and now the problem seems to have gone away.

 

[spirits247]

If it is the card, you could also leave it as a 6970 to get the extra stream processors, but lower the clocks to reduce power draw and whine.