hardware alarm, siren, new noise to me?!?!

[designosaur]

Hello,

just made a friend put back together an old pc of mine, seems to work fine if not better than before.

however after playing a game for a few minutes the pc started to make a noise like an ambulance siren! the noise stopped a short time after i closed the game down this time, but carried on until i turned the machine off on the previous occasion.

what on earth does this mean?

thanks!

-Theo

[Splash]

usually a warning that you're overheating

[designosaur]

cool thanks, that makes sense.

he put in new ram and he also altered the overheat settings. i will investigate further.

thanks again.

[BUFF]

if it's an abit it's usally either a temp, fan rpm or voltage out of the set warning parameters.

[Jay]

is it a Sony by any chance?

[HSK]

Sounds like the over heat alarm. theres usually a few different settings on what level/temp it goes off at.

[speardane]

a few practical thoughts

a) all all the fans running?
did they all get plugged back into the board (for temperature control) or onto a power connector?

nb if they are board controlled the speed warning settings should be lower (as discussed above)

b) are all the cable runs tidy? big floppy / IDE cables are great for obstructing airflow... I don't do customisation - but round cables are an improvement here

c) did you re-attach the fan to the cpu? if so did you clean -off the old thermal transfer (with IPA) and reapply new?

d) did you clean all the fans & filters? the amount fluff that builds up is remarkable?

sorry if that's all obvious - but would be a good starting checklist

[threepe]

On a totally different tack, check that the graphics card does not need an extra power connector. More powerful cards do, and if the extra connector is missing they emit a very loud noise. Normally this noise is heard as soon as the computer is turned on, however if the card does not draw much power the noise may not be triggered until you are in your game.

Try the above ideas first

Oh, and lastly I had an issue like this that was extreme coil whine. The combination of GFX, mobo and PSU did not like each other. It made a whistling noise like a steam train when in games. The noise honestly went round the whole house. The solution was to change out either the GFX or PSU.

Oh, further edit. Make sure that you do not have a PCI card obstructing the fan on the GFX card. Its quite easy to do if you have a sound card plugged in underneath the GFX card.