970/980 Coil Whine

I think I've seen a couple posts here and there where people had the MSI GTX 970 but didn't complaing about coil whine.

Also I've definitely seen at least 3 users reporting no (or very little) coil whine with their Gigabyte 970s, so that makes me a bit hopeful.

And yeah my EVGA 750 Ti squeals too.
 
n=1 said:
couple posts here and there where people had the MSI GTX 970 but didn't complaing about coil whine.
Click to expand...

to those of you with whine-less gtx 970s: have you tried furmark with the furry thing removed?
 
flod said:
to those of you with whine-less gtx 970s: have you tried furmark with the furry thing removed?
Click to expand...

Keep in mind, this same test is very likely to make your PSU whine due to the larger-the-average power draw. Many people may be hearing their PSU and mistaking it for their graphics card.
 
I have an MSI 970 Gaming and like I said before, I BARELY notice anything on mine. The only time I hear any change is when doing that thing with FurMark. And I have to hold my ear up to it, literally touching it. But I have all my case fans at max, including the GPU's. I sleep with my case about 3 feet away from my head too.
 
Here's something to try if you're looking to tease apart PSU whine from GPU whine: bench your CPU using XTU's built-in benchmark.

For whatever reason my AX1200i shrieks in a very regular on-off rhythm when I bench XTU. It's weird because so far XTU has been the only program capable of making my AX1200i whine audibly. Any other CPU bench like wPrime, SuperPI, POVRay, and CineBench do not cause any PSU whine whatsoever.
 
I've posted on all of asus social media sites and even contacted JJ from pcdiy to try and get more info.

It would be so helpful if Kyle could contact an asus rep regarding the coil whine and if it's related to the psu.
 
n=1 said:
Here's something to try if you're looking to tease apart PSU whine from GPU whine: bench your CPU using XTU's built-in benchmark.
Click to expand...
The maximum power draw from your average CPU is nowhere near what a GTX 970 will pull. It might not be enough to get the PSU squealing.

A lot of people here are running 65w CPU's, while the GTX 970 will pull upwards of 145w. pretty big difference.
 
Personal Update:

Last night before I going out for a dinner I decided to test my GPU overclocking with FurMark.
I only overclocked the GPU core for 185MHz+, +10mV, 110% Power Limit, Custom Fan speed set to 50% max and during FurMark boosted clock speed showed as 1501MHz at around 63C steady.

Since I wasn't going to be home to monitor this... I toggled off the Furry Object only and left home. Back home after about 3.5hours. Darn thing still buzzing/coil whine and running. I let it run in the background as is and watched some videos and decided to goto bed with Furry Object on.

Woke up around 9am & FurMark is still running so I turned it off. Gone to wash up to fully wake myself up, ran FurMark again and immediately toggled off Furry Object and I thought I was still asleep! because now I almost could not hear the buzz/coil whine, I could clearly hear a sound difference when toggling it ON & OFF but very very low level noise now. Wow? Not sure what the hell happened during past few hours but something have changed, maybe it something got cooked. haha

That is my update for now, I will monitor the GPU over next few days to make sure card itself won't die on me now.
Can't really return the product as stock level is extremely low and local store I bought it from was the only computer shop that had it and it is now back-ordered. Since Asus Service Center is very close to me I might just goto ASUS directly to get it checked out if anything.


To be continued...
 
Unknown-One said:
The maximum power draw from your average CPU is nowhere near what a GTX 970 will pull. It might not be enough to get the PSU squealing.

A lot of people here are running 65w CPU's, while the GTX 970 will pull upwards of 145w. pretty big difference.
Click to expand...

Right I should probably add I'm using a 130W 4930K, which is essentially a slightly more efficient 970. :p

Anyway my other point was XTU was somehow able to get my PSU squealing while other CPU intensive benchmarks were not, and not even Prime95 could make my PSU whine. So there's something very peculiar about XTU. Bottom line it doesn't hurt to try XTU and see if you can get any noise out of your PSU.
 
Marcdaddy said:
My Gigabyte G1 Windforce GTX 980s have no Whine, super quiet.
Click to expand...
I really doubt that. You probably have some but its just bothersome or audible over your other fans. It seems like nearly every one of these G1 cards have it.

I have very tiny faint coil whine on my reference 980. I literally cant hear it at all sitting in my chair or even listening for it from the top of the case. I can only hear it if I put my ear to the side of the case right in front of the card. Even then I really have to try hard to hear it and it mainly happens at high framerates.
 
misterbobby said:
I really doubt that. You probably have some but its just bothersome or audible over your other fans. It seems like nearly every one of these G1 cards have it.

I have very tiny faint coil whine on my reference 980. I literally cant hear it at all sitting in my chair or even listening for it from the top of the case. I can only hear it if I put my ear to the side of the case right in front of the card. Even then I really have to try hard to hear it and it mainly happens at high framerates.
Click to expand...

Well with my case door open and stock settings im listening for it..... nope nothing there, I can make a video. Really around 70% does it get a little noisy but when I'm playing games the speakers drown out everything.
 
XXGG said:
...I could clearly hear a sound difference when toggling it ON & OFF but very very low level noise now. Wow? Not sure what the hell happened during past few hours but something have changed, maybe it something got cooked. haha....
Click to expand...

The squeal is vibration from a gap between 2 elements/components that has AC flowing through at least one of them.
The gap size will be affected by heat (as you guessed) so its worth trying again when they have cooled down.
If you are lucky, something has shifted position/worn/melted and its no longer as bad.
 
I have no coil whine at all. Asus reference 980 / EVGA SC 750ti / Corsair AX1200
 
XXGG said:
Last night before I going out for a dinner I decided to test my GPU overclocking with FurMark.
Click to expand...
With Maxwell, I suggest that you test overclocks with real workloads. Constant synthetic workloads might be useful if you're going to use the card primarily for compute, but if you're just using it for gaming, you'll find you're going to have much more headroom than what FurMark would suggest.
 
Syribo said:
I have an MSI 970 Gaming and like I said before, I BARELY notice anything on mine. The only time I hear any change is when doing that thing with FurMark. And I have to hold my ear up to it, literally touching it. But I have all my case fans at max, including the GPU's. I sleep with my case about 3 feet away from my head too.
Click to expand...

have you run into any fan issues i.e stopping or overheating?
 
MSI gaming 980GTX.
Corsair 1000W PS
No coil whine that I can hear, and I have all quiet fans in my case.
Ran valley for a while, plus like 20 hours of Dead rising 3 with everything cranked.
Fans work fine, and card runs cool.
Seems like I got a winner

Also note I was really anal about carefully removing the sticker across the fan
 
TE2 said:
MSI gaming 980GTX.
Corsair 1000W PS
No coil whine that I can hear, and I have all quiet fans in my case.
Ran valley for a while, plus like 20 hours of Dead rising 3 with everything cranked.
Fans work fine, and card runs cool.
Seems like I got a winner

Also note I was really about carefully removing the sticker across the fan
Click to expand...

I own a G1 Gamming 980 however i am thinking about take it back to get 2x 970s msi but i am afraid of getting a bad fan issue or coil whine what some people are getting

The 980 supposedly has independent vrm and gpu cooling and will not have the fan issue. Maybe i should just anti up the cash and go with MSI 980 gaming. I am all about quiet pc and although my gigabyte overclocks quite high and seems silent i think the way to go is 0db for sli on the desktop. I will be perfectly satisfied though spending about 680 bucks for 2x MSI and overclocking them to stock GTX 980 levels for the next 12 months. I just dont see how 2x 980s will be beneficial for me at 2560x1440 at 60hz.

I feel in 12 months 6-8 gb cards will be released and possibly a faster maxwell process at the 349-399 price point we are seeing now. These video cards already blow away most next gen games when it comes to performance. Most PC games seem to be ports from consoles. I do like the 980s alot my firestrike score OC was 13,240
 
XXGG said:
Personal Update:

Last night before I going out for a dinner I decided to test my GPU overclocking with FurMark.
I only overclocked the GPU core for 185MHz+, +10mV, 110% Power Limit, Custom Fan speed set to 50% max and during FurMark boosted clock speed showed as 1501MHz at around 63C steady.

Since I wasn't going to be home to monitor this... I toggled off the Furry Object only and left home. Back home after about 3.5hours. Darn thing still buzzing/coil whine and running. I let it run in the background as is and watched some videos and decided to goto bed with Furry Object on.

Woke up around 9am & FurMark is still running so I turned it off. Gone to wash up to fully wake myself up, ran FurMark again and immediately toggled off Furry Object and I thought I was still asleep! because now I almost could not hear the buzz/coil whine, I could clearly hear a sound difference when toggling it ON & OFF but very very low level noise now. Wow? Not sure what the hell happened during past few hours but something have changed, maybe it something got cooked. haha

That is my update for now, I will monitor the GPU over next few days to make sure card itself won't die on me now.
Can't really return the product as stock level is extremely low and local store I bought it from was the only computer shop that had it and it is now back-ordered. Since Asus Service Center is very close to me I might just goto ASUS directly to get it checked out if anything.


To be continued...
Click to expand...

trying this right now... it may just be in my head but i think it's getting better :eek:
 
UnrealCpu said:
I own a G1 Gamming 980 however i am thinking about take it back to get 2x 970s msi but i am afraid of getting a bad fan issue or coil whine what some people are getting

The 980 supposedly has independent vrm and gpu cooling and will not have the fan issue. Maybe i should just anti up the cash and go with MSI 980 gaming. I am all about quiet pc and although my gigabyte overclocks quite high and seems silent i think the way to go is 0db for sli on the desktop. I will be perfectly satisfied though spending about 680 bucks for 2x MSI and overclocking them to stock GTX 980 levels for the next 12 months. I just dont see how 2x 980s will be beneficial for me at 2560x1440 at 60hz.

I feel in 12 months 6-8 gb cards will be released and possibly a faster maxwell process at the 349-399 price point we are seeing now. These video cards already blow away most next gen games when it comes to performance. Most PC games seem to be ports from consoles. I do like the 980s alot my firestrike score OC was 13,240
Click to expand...

What fan issue on the 970? The fans getting stuck on 100%? I thought people were able to fix that by simply not running multiple fan controls app at the same time.
 
ocellaris said:
What fan issue on the 970? The fans getting stuck on 100%? I thought people were able to fix that by simply not running multiple fan controls app at the same time.
Click to expand...

yeah fans getting stuck at 100% or not turning on when supposed to which can cause overheating
there is no official fix from MSI go research the forum on that website
 
flod said:
trying this right now... it may just be in my head but i think it's getting better :eek:
Click to expand...

Yes I have also personally witnessed (or rather, heard :D) that this "burning in" with your favorite benchmark/game does lead to decreased coil whine
 
n=1 said:
Yes I have also personally witnessed (or rather, heard :D) that this "burning in" with your favorite benchmark/game does lead to decreased coil whine
Click to expand...

This seems to be the case. My gigabyte does not whine nowhere near as bad as day one.

I would love to get somebody with electronic engineering background to chime in. I asked a good friend of mine who used to work for motorola designing and building boards and I am waiting to hear back from him. Another friend I asked who has experience in this field said that this is called "electronic noise" and is a known issue but most quality electronics include some sort of filtering or dampening methods to reduce or eliminate this as it would not be acceptable to the customer.

Once I hear back from my friend from Motorola I will update.
 
Fans getting stuck at 100%? If it works anything like the older GK110 based cards, that's a result of a noisy RPM signal.

Fire up EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner, set the monitoring interval down to 100ms, and watch the fan tachometer graph. If you see random spikes in the graph, you have a noisy RPM signal. Enough noise and the card will go into fault-protect mode (which attempts to ramp the fan up to 100% speed).

The only fix for this particular issue would be to take apart the cooler and shield the wires running to the fans. Maybe even add a ferrite core to soak up some of the noise.
 
update:
mine still whine after a night of furmark... hard to say if it's as bad as before though
 
Unknown-One said:
Fans getting stuck at 100%? If it works anything like the older GK110 based cards, that's a result of a noisy RPM signal.

Fire up EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner, set the monitoring interval down to 100ms, and watch the fan tachometer graph. If you see random spikes in the graph, you have a noisy RPM signal. Enough noise and the card will go into fault-protect mode (which attempts to ramp the fan up to 100% speed).

The only fix for this particular issue would be to take apart the cooler and shield the wires running to the fans. Maybe even add a ferrite core to soak up some of the noise.
Click to expand...

Well, problem is tad more complicated. It seems, from what I read on MSI forums, that MSI QA and some of the engineers made a lot of fubars with fans. First, if you peel the sticker too hard, you can damage the fan. Then on some of the cards it seems there is a problem with bearings, so you need to ramp the fans to 100% and keep tchem at it, till the bearings loosen up a bit. In some cards, people do suspect vBIOS problems.

IMO the whole problem with coil whine/bad cooling units (yes, you EVGA)/fan problem is that NVIDIA get too little time to produce the cards or the card makers wanted to release cards too fast. That's why there is not enough quantity to fulfill the needs, and lots of batches have some kind of flaws. I believe that if they would wait like a month with release, we would get much more refined product and with more aviability.

I guess, best thing now is waiting a bit, till early batches sold out, and the 970 GTX 2.0 comes with less whine, less fan problems and so on :)
 
MorgothPl said:
IMO the whole problem with coil whine/bad cooling units (yes, you EVGA)/fan problem is that NVIDIA get too little time to produce the cards or the card makers wanted to release cards too fast. That's why there is not enough quantity to fulfill the needs, and lots of batches have some kind of flaws. I believe that if they would wait like a month with release, we would get much more refined product and with more aviability.

I guess, best thing now is waiting a bit, till early batches sold out, and the 970 GTX 2.0 comes with less whine, less fan problems and so on :)
Click to expand...

I think the problem is exacerbated by the lack of a reference board for 970. Sometimes it really is best to just stick to reference and not think you can outsmart nVidia it seems.
 
I keep wondering, why isn't coil whine one of the first priorities that the manufacturer tries to eliminate? Should be like, does this card work? OK -> Coil Whine benchmark -> Nope, back to drawing board.

I can't imagine it being a healthy business with so much RMAs due coil whine. I don't get it how coil whine can still be such a widespread issue, manufacturers have to start developing cards with coil whine in mind, otherwise it's just stupid decisions. Who wants to have a bird chirping 24/7 in his computer? Lower frequencies such as blowing noise of fans etc is easier to get used to but high pitched irregular chirping/screeching is just not possible to get used to.
 
RPGWiZaRD said:
I keep wondering, why isn't coil whine one of the first priorities that the manufacturer tries to eliminate? Should be like, does this card work? OK -> Coil Whine benchmark -> Nope, back to drawing board.

I can't imagine it being a healthy business with so much RMAs due coil whine. I don't get it how coil whine can still be such a widespread issue, manufacturers have to start developing cards with coil whine in mind, otherwise it's just stupid decisions. Who wants to have a bird chirping 24/7 in his computer? Lower frequencies such as blowing noise of fans etc is easier to get used to but high pitched irregular chirping/screeching is just not possible to get used to
Click to expand...

.I think I'm just gonna quote this the next time some idiot comes around telling me "but it's not even that loud!". Yeah no shit it's not the intensity that's the problem, it's the frequency. Fans make low frequency hums, and can easily be tuned out. A high pitched squeal? Yeah good luck.
 
RPGWiZaRD said:
I can't imagine it being a healthy business with so much RMAs due coil whine. I don't get it how coil whine can still be such a widespread issue, ...
Click to expand...

That's just it. Perhaps it's not widespread. There are likely thousands of people without any whine. Fortunately the forums have plenty of whine from the people with the issue. ;)
 
Starrbuck said:
That's just it. Perhaps it's not widespread. There are likely thousands of people without any whine. Fortunately the forums have plenty of whine from the people with the issue. ;)
Click to expand...

yeah, but that issue alone prevented me from upgrading to two gtx970s, I'll keep waiting for amd cards or the 980ti.. I'll take low fps over coil whine any day
 
SLI ASUS STRIX 970
- No coil whine from either card or power supply in my system under any kind of load.
 
SLI MSI 970 Gaming, no coil whine. All this coil whine talk, I don't think I've ever even heard coil whine before lol. I've owned 20+ different graphics cards since the nvidia 200 series and amd 4000 series.
 
seems like a gamble I guess, or maybe a bad batch of cards, still enough to scare me off :\
 
Starrbuck said:
That's just it. Perhaps it's not widespread. There are likely thousands of people without any whine. Fortunately the forums have plenty of whine from the people with the issue. ;)
Click to expand...

Or perhaps because of a lack of reference board, the 970 is more prone to coil whine issues? Or hell could be as simple as a bad batch of cards, though that really says something about the QC of MSI and Gigabyte in that case.

Just because something wasn't common in the past doesn't exclude it from being a common occurence in the present either.
 
According to LinusTechTips, the 970s are heavily back ordered. The sale is unprecedented and overtakes the mining era in terms of the GPUs sold.

Looks like the vendors have their work cut out to replenish their inventory. The blame squarely goes to nVidia for pricing these at 329$ with great non-reference designs available at 349$ only. Seems like every one wants these cards now.

Heck I can't even get my 290xs sold at 375$ on ebay. No interest from anyone since 20 days :/
 
rofl nVidia just can't win can they, price it too high and people complain, price it too low and people complain :D

i keed of course
 
My update:

As for coil whine/buzz... it is now very very low to non but on a full load now I can hear a very low level of whine noise.

Even doing the FurMark furry object off does not produce noticeable coil whine anymore. I mean there still is but very very low level of noise now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top