Strange ticking noise coming from my... CPU!?

[southsider]

Picture this, I'm in the BIOS, no HDDs installed or anything.

As I pan from page to page, I hear a kind of rapid ticking noise as it draws the text. It's coming from my CPU I swear!

It's happened since I started with this PC, and its very easy to reproduce. Not very loud, but still annoying. If I scroll this webpage, tick tick tick. If I resize a column in Explorer (detail view, like the pros), tick tick tick.

It's seriously got me worried. Does anyone have any ideas?

Asus P4P800 Deluxe
P4 Northwood C 2.8GHz / 800MHz
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB

Cheers

[ERU]

It probably the HeatSinkFan assemby - give it a bit of a clean and check the ball bearing in it.

[Michael]

It's the graphics card
I had this problem with an old GeForce4, fixed itself after taking it out and giving it a good clean... giving the heatsink a nudge maybe. Try it, tell us how you get on.

http://www.videocard-forum.com/ati/A...em_177836.html
http://www.computing.net/hardware/ww...rum/26455.html

[Spud1]

yup sounds like the Gcard =)

getting an Arctic cooler solved the prob for me

[Shogun]

What powersupply you using? As some of those are known to tick, e.g tagans (no problems with q-tecs )

[unrealrocks]

Yeah - some do this, those Zalman coolers do that alot.

[crossy]

If you're that sure it's the cpu, what about removing the heatsink; take the cpu out of the socket, then remount everything? Maybe there's something that's not seated properly...

From another thread it looks like you're using a Zalman flower cooler - could the ticking noise be coming from that instead of the cpu - more likely imho, in which case it's likely to be cause by airflow causing one of the H/S vanes to tap another. Clean it up or temporarily try another H/S and see whether this solves the problem.

Cheers

Crossy.

[Michael]

Not nescisarily; When i had the problem it wasn't constant, it is as he said: Only when you scroll or drag a window... which is very strange, but it WAS coming from the graphics card, so again i recommend just taking it out, giving it a bit of a clean and putting it back.

[mrplow]

It's the graphics card

Mine does it sometimes too, my old 5950 did it LOADS and really rather noisy.

If you can live with it, don't bother trying to solve it.
If you can't, I dunno... seems people have had success with reseating or replacing coolers (dunno why)

[LayZeh]

Funny how this has been kept quiet, i haven't heard of this EVER and it seems to only be an issue with nvidia cards? ...

[da_ging]

i get this aswell ,especially when scrolling or selecting text in adode acrobat ?!?

defo some sort of electrical noise and seems to be related to cpu usage were u jump from 0 to full and back again and is not from the video card

[southsider]

Nay, it happens with my Sapphire Radeon 9000 too. No problems on my A7V333 board, though.

A bit of handy microphone work would reveal that it does sound as if it's coming from the card though. Possibly the northbridge. Or the CPU.

I'm going to record this some time today and get it online.

Cheers

[southsider]

Da_ging, what setup you got?

[southsider]

Wow, I've just run Prime95 and it DEFINITELY starts squealing and ticking (the same) when my CPU usage goes up.

I might try refitting my Heatsink or whatever, but I have a feeling it's a pretty futile attempt to fix it. I don't wanna RMA my CPU I'll be without a machine for weeks

[southsider]

Small FFTs is more of a quiet ticking
In-place large FFTs is squealing. Gonna fiddle now.

[doctor_prox]

Whats an FFT?