GTX970 making a high pitched whine under load

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xFlankerx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 30, 2005
Messages
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I recently bought an MSI GTX 970 and it has started to make a very strange high pitched noise when GPU Usage climbs up. It starts immediately with the GPU Usage climb and is unrelated to the spinning of the fans. GPU voltage is a trailing indicator of the noise, obviously it's related to GPU Usage but it is not directly correlated with the sound.

As for the sound itself, imagine a tiny mechanical part spinning really really fast, like a centrifuge or the turbocharger in a car. It's very high-frequency, very high-pitched, and changes depending on what's on the screen. Although the best correlation is with GPU Usage, currently I'm running the Kombustor benchmark and the pitch of the sound is changing with the GPU Power % chart.

The existence of the sound does not change whether the video card is overclocked or not. Temperatures top out at 65 degrees Celcius.

Any ideas what could be causing it? Should I RMA the card?
 
Thanks for the tip, I looked around. Couldn't determine if it's a dangerous problem to have or just inconvenient? Will MSI's RMA department replace it?
 
xFlankerx said:
Thanks for the tip, I looked around. Couldn't determine if it's a dangerous problem to have or just inconvenient? Will MSI's RMA department replace it?
Click to expand...

A large percentage of 970s/980s have coil whine. I tried 3 cards. Two Gigabyte 970s and an MSI 980. All had it. So kept the 980. From what I've read, it's not considered a defect and it's something high end users have to deal with.
 
For me it literally only occurs during certain game's splash screens (intro cinematics+ads or whatever).
 
yeah, I had a similar experience to t1337dude, in that it got louder as the fps went up. splash screens were particularly bad - running at 300fps or whatever it was.

vsync and keeping it to 60fps helped, but some games still got the card to warble.
 
I tried two STRIX 970s. The first one was really bad, terrible noise under load, didn't matter if it was 40 or 200 fps, it was super noisy. Went back to the shop immediately. The second one I got is almost dead silent! I could't believe it! I didn't change anything in the system from one card to another, same PSU , mobo etc.

It's a lottery with these cards....
 
Turning on vsync or limiting your fps should help unless the card whines all the time.
 
Starrbuck said:
This forum, however, has plenty of whine! But we could use some cheese.
Click to expand...
Mmmmm cheese!

I haven't heard any coil whine from my 970 but then again, I haven't really been listening for it nor do I have that quiet of a computer/room anyway.
 
Tup3x said:
Turning on vsync or limiting your fps should help unless the card whines all the time.
Click to expand...

This is true, coil whine happens when the card runs at too high FPS. I was running 3DMark03 on my 970 and when it hits 3k fps or so it cried like a little bitch :D I was afraid it was going to blow lol
 
tuan2195 said:
This is true, coil whine happens when the card runs at too high FPS. I was running 3DMark03 on my 970 and when it hits 3k fps or so it cried like a little bitch :D I was afraid it was going to blow lol
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Now after ALL these years, that makes sense why my 570 and 670 FTW card would scream everytime during cinematic/loading when the framerate would hit 300fps + on prerendered scenes and then go back to being quiet on realtime loads
 
xFlankerx said:
Thanks for the tip, I looked around. Couldn't determine if it's a dangerous problem to have or just inconvenient? Will MSI's RMA department replace it?
Click to expand...

Most likely not just for that reason. They do not consider it a ill effect. It's just annoying.
 
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