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An Applied Investigation Into Graphics Card Coil Whine
jones_supa writes We all are aware of various chirping and whining sounds that electronics can produce. Modern graphics cards often suffer from these kind of problems in form of coil whine. But how widespread is it really? Hardware Canucks put 50 new graphics cards side-by-side to compare them solely from the perspective of subjective acoustic disturbance. NVIDIA's reference platforms tended to be quite well behaved, just like their board partners' custom designs. The same can't be said about AMD since their reference R9 290X and R9 290 should be avoided if you're at all concerned about squealing or any other odd noise a GPU can make. However the custom Radeon-branded SKUs should usually be a safe choice. While the amount and intensity of coil whine largely seems to boil down to luck of the draw, at least most board partners are quite friendly regarding their return policies concerning it.
Is this what is whining in the mac pro 2013 desktops?
I can't hear the whine over the sound of my wind tunnel!
This frequently bleeds into the actual audio subsystems attached to your computer as a voltage disturbance that causes incredibly annoying screeches and pops.
Motherboard got fried by lightning, replaced said motherboard, video card now whines.
I've gotten used to it.
I've designed lots of these little switch mode supplies. (SMPSs)
The noise comes from the inductors. Inductors are coils of wire around a ferrite. When the current changes through the wire, the wire physically expands and contacts from every other wire. This is the source of the noise. (SMPSs normally switch from 200kHz to 2MHz, so well outside our audio range)
There are a few things a designer can do.
1. Encapsulate the coil. This holds the wire tighter together and can minimise noise, but is only usually used in large inductors like those in invertors for UPSs or solar.
2. Eliminate subsonic oscillation with good multi-pole compensation. Switch mode power supplies have, have first second and third order responses which require filters to damp them. If you don't design these filters well, you can get subsonic oscillation which falls into the audio band. The power supply still regulates OK, but you can get that annoying whine.
3. Occasionally the noise can also come from a periodic load with that falls into an audio range. More capacitors on the output can help that.
Also, very very occasionally, it can come from ceramic capacitors that use a high k dielectric that are microphonic, but in my experience it is usually the capacitor acting as a microphone that upsets the circuit.
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I understand that high-frequency magnetics are at risk of physical oscillation(the detailed math is right over my head; but all it takes is one part of the part attracting or repelling another part of the part, at least under some input waveforms, and you'll potentially see movement, which easily enough turns to sound); but the seemingly obvious solution is just to pot the magnetics in an adequately thermally conductive epoxy or other encapsulant.
Does anybody know if that just adds too much cost, without performance benefit, and so gets cut during the BOM penny pinching? Do potting compounds have properties that degrade the performance or efficiency of common magnetics? Why is it that, if coil whine is an issue, they aren't just dipping the things in epoxy and calling it a day?
I always though the noise from coming from a cap that was ready to explode.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If there is no fan to drown out the noise, any time you launch a 3d application you hear the whine. Especially when you OC the card to the tits, and then launch 3D mark or something else to test stability, the whine in the middle of a quiet night would be extremely apparent. As someone else above said, feels like you are about to pop a capacitor or two.
No, he's too busy selling Alaska back to China in order to pay off their share of the national debt. Also to get rid of Sarah Palin, once and for all, since she'll be deported as she still claims to be Governor of Arkansas for some reason so that people will care about her.
As if anybody cares that she lives in an Arizona Palace.
Are people actually hearing inductor acoustic oscillation over FAN NOISE? If you can hear yourself think over your graphics card, YOU'RE NOT A REAL GAMER!.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
So should we posthumously convict Reagan of treason too?
Selling arms to the enemies of the United States?
Sure, let's convict old Ronnie Boy.
ug.. Coil whine happened to me a few years ago on a brand new card so i RMA'ed the card. At the time it took some convincing to issue the rma too iirc. They shipped me some refurb card that never worked right. And the next one didn't work right (unstable or just plain DOA cant recall). By now Im up to 40 bucks just in shipping these crap cards back to the company. Never did get a working card out of it. The next card they sent me was awesome (2gb video ram at the time), but it was never stable. Ended up just buying an AMD card after that.
Should have just stuck with the damn whine, but it was driving my wife crazy (i can wear ear phones). And it was a brand new card under warranty, so I wasnt going to go desolder coils right off the bat!
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I cannot believe how loud our GTX660's from EVGA are. Wherever you're sitting in whatever country you're in right now, you can probably hear it. Some of our 550ti's and GTX650's are the same. The 650's aren't even high wattage! It's just completely unacceptable. I can hear up to about 40KHz so I've had my fair share of loud electronics that only I can hear. At least this frequency is within normal human range so more people can complain about it.
If you're still using fans to cool your PC, THEN you're not a real gamer.
How much internal state information is leaked in the noises?
Without doing something really exotic you'll at least one to three fans to cool your typical radiator depending on it's size, and double that if you're doing a push-pull configuration.
of course, but radiator fans especially in push-pull can be undervolted to levels that make them essentially inaudible over your base noise floor in the room if you select the right components. Unless you are trying to OC with some hero level voltage bumps watercooling is far and away quieter than direct fans.
Of course the operative words above are 'select the right components' - any badly balanced pumps or super restrictive flow plates/hoses, or poorly designed reservoirs can give a whole new set of sounds to deal with.
Without doing something really exotic...
And that was the intention of the comment, captain.
In my experience PSU makes a difference. Unfortunately I've for whatever reason been with AMD for a long time. I just can't shake it :(.
I have a Seasonic PSU 1000W platinum and 0 coil whine on 2 7970's in crossfire. This is something everyone skimps on, PSU.
IMO the study should test a range of PSU's, high-end to low end and put the GPU's under load.
I can't explain it really but from what I've read it may be to do with ripple on the 12v rails with PSU load.
Sure is a lot different these days. Back in my youth, in the mid 70's, I worked in a television repair shop. We'd get tv's in that the "women of the house" could hear the flyback transformer whine. Usually around 15k in frequency. Sometimes I could hear it, sometimes I couldn't. Only thing you could do back then was to swap out horizontal output or horizontal oscillator tubes, hoping to get one that was just right, so the person couldn't hear the whine.