Coil whine...?

Hello everyone,

I've recently gone out and bought a second graphics card so I could SLI with it. It's a Gigabyte nVidia GTX 670 2GB OC and I originally had a Galaxy GTX 670 2GB OC. Everything is good, but when I launch some games, I get a fair amount of coil whine.
Now, I'm not 100% whether it's the graphics card(s) or my PSU (which is a Antec Truepower 650w, by the way), but when I turn Vsync on, the coil whining completely disappears. Because of this, I pretty sure it's the graphics card.

I've come here to ask whether or not you guys think it's a video card or a PSU issue and if there's a fix for it, or if I should just take it back to where I bought it. I'm really hoping it's not the PSU.

P.S. The PSU is roughly a year old.

Thanks,

Jamedog.

Your ear... put it by the GPUs and then the PSU... where is it coming from? You are most likely correct in that it is one of the GPUs. Coil whine is what it is. I didnt know you can return a card for coil whine.

EarthDog said:

Your ear... put it by the GPUs and then the PSU... where is it coming from? You are most likely correct in that it is one of the GPUs. Coil whine is what it is. I didnt know you can return a card for coil whine.

Click to expand...

Have to admit, it sounds like it's coming from the PSU but because they're pretty close to each other it's hard to say exactly. If it is indeed coil whine coming from the graphics card then I'm not too bothered by it.

Interestingly, I used to get a lot of coil whine whilst in the menus of Minecraft. Since I've gone SLI, that coil whine has disappeared.

Just a frequency thing. If you have exposed coils on the card, perhaps a bit of clear nail polish will resolve the issue.

Coil whine is a tough issue to troubleshoot. Even if you pinpoint the source of the sound, the component itself may not actually be defective. Coil whine often occurs from interactions between a very specific combination of hardware, and in these cases none of the parts will show any signs of it until all of them are combined. Replacing components sometimes fixes the problem, but not always. You said it disappears when you enable Vsync though, so honestly I would just leave Vsync enabled since it looks much nicer anyway and move on. As long as the noise is not bothersome or you're able to eliminate it, coil whine in certain situations isn't unusual and, in my opinion, is no cause for concern.

Make sure you don't have one of those lamps with dimmers around your comp. Those will make it whine badly.