Z390 VRM Coil Whine

[Heinz57]

I've been considering moving to the Z390 platform, but I've read a fair few posts and user reviews complaining about VRM coil whine. A wide range of manufacturers and models are mentioned (particularly Gigabyte Aorus and lower/mid Asus).

Is this genuinely wide spread or are these people just unlucky?

I'd never heard of coil whine on a motherboard before. I've experienced coil whine from the GPU at load, but at least you can drown it out in games. Putting up with it when I'm doing basic work would drive me to distraction and puts me off forking out a reasonable sum for an upgrade. I've read some people have had various degrees of success disabling C-states, but that doesn't seem like a very elegant solution (and shouldn't be necessary).

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Heinz57]

Thanks for the replies, something to think about.

The Aorus seems to get such good reviews, yet it seems to get the most complaints about coil whine. How bad are the Gigabyte UD or Gaming X? I know their VRMs are inferior to the Aorus, but are they good enough for a stock 9700k?

 

[Heinz57]

I've got an 8700k all cores at 4.8Ghz without any hassle. The UD was made for a 9700k, it's a bit no frills but it's a great board.

Yeah any of the Gigabyte Z390 boards will handle the 9700K just fine. The entry level Z390 UD will even handle the 9900K albeit at stock or with a mild overclock. There is a video on youtube from Hardware Unboxed and he couldn't get the Gigabyte board to thermal throttle with a 9900K although it was running very hot on the VRM's.

actually, can take something like 600 amps compared to Aorus Master's 400amps- if you want to get technical . what the difference is, is the quality of the phase unit and its power delivery .

all cores boards have been designed to run 9900k without throttling ! Aorus boards been designed to do it with high overclock, and Master to run AVX loads 24/7

Merci. I'd been reading quite a lot about (inadequate) VRMs on Z390s and it's not something I'd really worried about for stock systems in the past - but some of the reviews had made me wonder! Don't really see the point in spending more than I have to if I don't plan to overclock (lack of time, more of a set and forget guy these days...).

 

[Heinz57]

just set M.C.E if youve got a good cooler - auto overclock for highest single clock speed against all cores - vrm and cou a bit warmer then manual OC due to more voltage

Was planning on reusing my old noctua u14s - hopefully that's sufficient.

 

[Heinz57]

Bugger, got my Z390 Auros board a couple of days a go and could immediately hear the coil whine on the desktop (no head in case here!), different PSU and also removed GPU, sound was still there, now I learn this is something many of these boards suffer from? Just my luck So what have people been doing, RMA'ing and hoping the replacement doesn't suffer from it?

Seems on Reddit that RMAs have solved for some, but not others. The whine appears to be related to C-states though, some people have got rid of the whine by disabling all C-States, others just C1E. A bit of a crude fix, but it's not uncommon to disable them if you're overclocking I suppose.

 

[Heinz57]

Hmmm, only tried the C1E off so far, sadly it still whines. Might try the rest.

Bit annoying really, if it happened during gaming I probably wouldn't even notice over the fan noise. As it happens while doing nothing on the desktop, its far more annoying.

Did any of the other C-state settings help?

 

[Heinz57]

I tried with C1 state off, no change, then I turned every single C state off, and that actually did stop the whine. But im a bit of a tart and dont like the idea of having to do that, so it's gone back for an RMA today anyway (there was another issue with restarting the machine too).

Fair enough, I hope you get a board back without issues. I'll be interested to know how you get on!

I agree, you shouldn't have to turn off energy saving to stop the noise, (although apparently it's only ~5w difference at idle for a 9700k), it's what is holding me back from clicking buy...

 

[Heinz57]

Had my replacement from OcUK. Despite not being able to reproduce the issues mentioned (coil whine/restart ends up shutting down), they sent a replacement anyway, so appreciate that.

Still have coil whine (think I will just find the right C-state and turn that off), but not yet ran into restart issue, so at least something seems fixed.

At least the restart issues are resolved.

I eventually bought a Gigabyte Z390 Gaming X and it whines a lot under some circumstances (eg on the desktop if tabbed outside of a game). I think it's probably just about tolerable enough at idle that I can live with it - although if the PC wasn't under a heavy wooden desk I think the sound would drive me mad. The motherboard sings at a really high pitch when the ethernet is under sustained load, but thankfully that's not too often!

I tried disabling C-states, but it didn't make enough of a difference to keep them disabled.