Coil whine ALL the time?

[ACBRAH]

I recently bought an EVGA GTX 1650. Upon first use I saw that the card ALWAYS buzzes under graphical load. Any game it will continuously buzz. Once I press windows keys and tab out to the desktop (while the game is minimised) the buzzing will stop. I have a Gigabyte GTX 1660 OC and although it whines too it is usually intermittent.

Called up EVGA support and they say it's normal. Got told to leave it overnight on Unigine and see if it improves.

Is this really normal for GPUs? I can expect coil whine here n there but this card is always buzzing which is odd.

My parts are: i5-10400F, MSI Z490 GAMING PLUS board, Be quiet 500W power plus 11 Gold PSU. So fairly quality stuff if I'm not wrong.

[virtuo]

It's standard, faster more power hungry cards just excacerbate the issue. My card has settled down a bit from new, but the whine is still there, specially when hammering the CUDA workloads.

What refresh rate are you running at? I find running my desktop at 120hz whines a lot more than at 60, so if you can drop refresh when not gaming it might help.

Some people have success in undervolting the card slightly, if you have the luxury of trying a different PSU then that could make the difference as well, I'm using a corsair PSU (not what I wanted, but all I could get).

[ACBRAH]

I see. I'm running at 144hz, I'll try reducing the refresh rate.

It's my first build so no other parts to cross reference with.

[MrJim]

I've never had a graphics card that has had continuous coil whine. I've got an MSI GTX 970 that whines in certain games & not others (Dying Light is particularly bad, for some reason). In some games it just whines when you're in the game menu, because the FPS is so high; once you start playing the game itself, the whine disappears. Sadly, it seems that it's just the 'luck of the draw' as to whether a particular card suffers from the problem.

[Spreadie]

Turning on V-Sync in games used to cure coil whine and cap scream in a lot of cases.

[ik9000]

you could try running the Nightraid stress test from 3D mark suite. Some people say it helps alleviate the whine by ragging the thing for a period to see if it beds itself in. https://benchmarks.ul.com/3dmark

I've not tried it myself, YMMV and don't blame me if it causes any problems. It should not however invalidate any warranties unlike a lot of the "dip the coils in resin" suggestions (which going by what they do in audio instruments could help but would be a problem warranty wise).

[spacein_vader]

I'd try the overnight thing, if that doesn't shift it and you're still in 14 days you can return under distance selling regs and rebuy another.

[lee_evo]

Every card I've owned over the past couple of years (and I've had a few) has had it to one degree or another. These days I just expect it, and luckily I've learnt to ignore it. As it only happens in games I just up the sound a little bit or put headphones on. I realise that's not a solution if you're especially sensitive to it, but it's pretty normal to hear coil whine and it has no impact on the card or it's performance.

As has previously been said v sync really helps.

[ik9000]

my laptop has it and it drives me crazy. I got an SSD and was looking forward to ditching the old HDD whir only to find the graphics chirps constantly in a more intrusive way than the HDD ever did. It's p-poor of the companies to just say "oh that's normal" it's basically communal laziness on their part. It can be designed out, they just can't be bothered.

[MintyPolo]

It's pretty normal to hear coil whine and it has no impact on the card or it's performance. .

This is music to my ears (no pun intended)!!

Have been experiencing this with my RTX 3080, had never had coil whine before with previous graphics cards so was a little concerning. Glad to hear it is somewhat normal and has no negative impact

[OwP]

So you can hear a whining when your PC is turned on, I get the same thing, how long have you been married ?

[ACBRAH]

I tried everything mentioned here. The card whined very literally all the time under any graphical load whether FPS was capped, graphics were low, v sync on. I ended up returning it to Amazon as not a cat in hells chance of getting a replacement. The gigabyte 1660 OC I have is great however it has a shroud/fan rattling problem so needed something to tide me over while I was to send it away.

[P1lk0]

Have previously had issues like this that actually turned out to be the power supply. Might be worth a check

[Pob255]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtXAuIJchps this might help

[ik9000]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtXAuIJchps this might help

I'll save you a boring watch. Video suggests users turn on Gsync/Freesync, cap frame rates. The comedy thing is his sound clips aren't great and it's hard to hear any discernible whine vs fan noise. Bit of a waste of time that one. I might just be getting old and grumpy but youtube seems to be increasingly a way to say in 10 minutes what could be distilled down and written in a short paragraph taking a minunte to read, quicker to load, and without the annoying google settings pop-up to have to go through every time.

[ACBRAH]

I tried the g sync/lower fps thing. Didn't change a thing.

As for the PSU i have this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

surely it's a quality brand + decent rating considering my components.