Weird noise from motherboard

maff20 · 30 Mar 2010 at 20:45

Hi folks,

I have a gigabyte P55A UD3R motherboard and it has started emitting the weirdest noise. Its a high pitched almost morse code sound, barley audible from a distance but if you take the side off the case you can certainly hear it.

At first i thought it was the PSU making the noise from the coils but now im totally convinced its coming from the motherboard. Its not the dvd drive, that has been disconnected and its not the hard drives, they have also been disconnected.

What on earth could be making that noise, its coming from around the cpu area - and its not any of the fans in the case - i have stopped or disconnected all of them to eliminate them as candidates.

maff20 · 30 Mar 2010 at 20:47

forgot to add that the pc seems to be functioning fine, no noticable problems as yet

Diggsy · 30 Mar 2010 at 21:07

Its probably an alarm built into the board to let you know there is a problem. Most work through the little motherboard speaker, but I would guess if you don't have one fitted it may still sound, only a lot lower volume.

This alarm can go off if you don't have a fan attached to the CPU header, if you have one with really slow startup voltage, or maybe you have the temp threshold set a little low.

Check in the bios that there isn't a setting to warn you when a fan fails or similar.

freddie64 · 31 Mar 2010 at 06:47

Sounds like it is coil whine to me. My UD5 makes the same noise, you will probably find it will stop if you disable speedstep.

Neil-UKWSD · 31 Mar 2010 at 09:36

Hi,

My UD5 also has coil whine, I disabled the C1E option in the BIOS and the whine stopped.

maff20 · 31 Mar 2010 at 14:31

isnt coil whine a defect as such? the mobo is only one month old, should i RMA it? ive never hear anything like it off any other PC iv owned.

Also forgot to add that it most definatley is not a error code beep. I should have probably explained it a bit better, the morse code like noise is of a lot higher pitch than a beep code and also extremely fast. Perhaps morse code isnt the best thing to compare it to but its the only way i knew how

Neil-UKWSD · 31 Mar 2010 at 19:24

Hi,

I had my UD5 replaced when I originally got it, the replacement had worse whine than the original so was sent straight back and I kept the original and just disabled the C1E option in the BIOS.

I'm now looking to replace this board with an Asus Rampage III Extreme once they are released.

OLDPHART · 1 Apr 2010 at 10:51

I had a mobo that made a noise (speaker disconected) it was caused by a certian set of mobo drivers. Updated the drivers, problem went away.

sammo62 · 21 Apr 2010 at 16:46

Haha my X58A-UD5 has this exact same problem.

Every time i scroll the mousewheel the mboard coil whines a little bit. Very strange, will disable speedstep.

ColonelCage · 29 Apr 2010 at 14:43

Yeah my X58-UD3R does this, but I was sure it was the CPU making the noise? It does seem to be related to power saving, C1E and/or Speedstep. Mine was making the noise almost constantly while just doing some light tasks or sitting idle, like it was always jumping between power states or voltage changes or something, yet on full load there was no noise(presumably because it wasn't changing speeds). Then in Windows 7 I adjusted the Power options, selected power plan is Balanced, setting min processor state is 5% and max 100% this has shut it up considerably, it doesn't seem to jump around nearly as much, noise is still there, just not whining away every few milliseconds.