970/980 Coil Whine

make options for no,msi; no,gigabyte; etc... because otherwise it wouldn't be a fair comparison between manufacturers as some brands are much more popular and will receive more votes even if their cards have the same chance of having whine
 
I must admit I am kind of surprised that someone has not figured out some sort of DIY mod (even if risky or requiring a lot of skill) to muffle or supress the noise coming off of the inductors, given that this is such a popular and awesome card except for the coil whine issue. I had a GTX 275 years ago that whined like crazy and I could not deal with that ever again. What would really be nice is if the manufacturers could find a way to beat this issue once and for all. Apparently this must be a very hard problem to solve (at a reasonable cost) or it would have been solved years ago. I do hope they know that coil whine is a problem that bothers many people.. and is made even worse by how quiet the fans now are on many cards. But, I also know this is a subjective thing, and some cards whine more than others, and some people hear better than others, and soom environments are quieter/louder than others. I think I will wait a few mos. to see if anything changes with this issue, but I think it might be kind of hard for them to solve for some reason.
 
tomd333 said:
I must admit I am kind of surprised that someone has not figured out some sort of DIY mod (even if risky or requiring a lot of skill) to muffle or supress the noise coming off of the inductors, given that this is such a popular and awesome card except for the coil whine issue. I had a GTX 275 years ago that whined like crazy and I could not deal with that ever again. What would really be nice is if the manufacturers could find a way to beat this issue once and for all. Apparently this must be a very hard problem to solve (at a reasonable cost) or it would have been solved years ago. I do hope they know that coil whine is a problem that bothers many people.. and is made even worse by how quiet the fans now are on many cards. But, I also know this is a subjective thing, and some cards whine more than others, and some people hear better than others, and soom environments are quieter/louder than others. I think I will wait a few mos. to see if anything changes with this issue, but I think it might be kind of hard for them to solve for some reason.
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it's difficult to "fix" because customers don't want to pay $xxx dollars for their card and manufacturers are skimping on build quality.
 
I got a new GTX 970 (ASUS Strix, same as the old one), and this one doesn't seem to make the screechy whine of the last one, but does buzz somewhat under load. I'm not sure if it's vibration from the fan or not, but at least it's much more tolerable.
 
an update on my FTW 970, the noise doesnt occur in any games, I only hear it on unigine, and then can only hear it if I put ear to back of case. :)
 
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I thought I would join the club, I'm on my 3rd pair of msi gtx970 gaming 4g cards and second power supply started off with a corsair ax860 and swapped to the evga supernova g2 850 and now I'm trying to RMA my mother board for testing but after reading this it probably is my gpu's
 
I have tried three MSI 970 Gaming cards now, all three had NO coil whine that I can detect thus far while benching or playing games. Although I must admit, I have never noticed any significant coil whine on any card that I have owned, and that is quite a few, so it could be I am just not sensitive to it.
 
Starrbuck said:
Just got my two ASUS STRIX GTX 970 cards... and... no coil whine.
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Lucky you!!! :(

I will change my case today for a Fractal Design R4 (silent). If it solve the issue, I will keep the videocard, if not, I will do another RMA.. the second one..

I wonder if it's not about the motherboard... I'm sure it's not about the PSU because I tried another one..

For people who have the coil whine..what's your motherboard? I have a ASUS Z97-A

thanks
 
flod said:
is this real life?
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Unfortunately yes it is for real, first 2 had whine returned them reseller agreed and gave refund, bought second pair both again had whine so this ttime I went straight to MSI who did an advanced RMA sending me 2 cards first which both again had whine so I sent them back to MSI and am currently returning the second pair for a refund.

I've swapped power supplies and have sent my motherboard back to reseller for testing as well. :/
 
for anyone who doubted that 970s tend to have more coil whine:
http://www.computerbase.de/2014-10/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-test-roundup-vergleich/4/
http://www.computerbase.de/2014-11/geforce-gtx-980-test-vergleich-round-up/5/


also update for my situation: i got an nvidia branded gtx 970 from best buy. it has no coil whine on the desktop or in game when fps <500. at high fps >1000, with furmark - furry, or with wei, there is audible coil whine but even there it is much better than my msi gtx 970s were.

i think this is as good as it gets with maxwell cards... well the ocuk version of the reference 970 has extra glue or something added to the inductors so it may be even better
 
I have no coil whine on my 980.

You know, a quick fix is to go to a couple concerts and stand next to the speakers. The closer the better. Another, even quicker method, is shooting off a couple rounds next to your ear. Your ears will be permenantly damaged and the high end frequencies usually go first.

Of course, don't actually do those things. An interesting factor in the poll might be age. Old people generally can't hear the same frequencies as young people.

Sound dampening material should be very effective on coil whine.
 
flod said:
also update for my situation: i got an nvidia branded gtx 970 from best buy.
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So there are actually nvidia branded (reference?) gtx 970s? It has the blower design, etc.? How's the noise?

What kind of connections does it have? I would like one with 3x DP ports and currently think the only one that fits is the Gigabyte model.
 
Dayaks said:
I have no coil whine on my 980.

You know, a quick fix is to go to a couple concerts and stand next to the speakers. The closer the better. Another, even quicker method, is shooting off a couple rounds next to your ear. Your ears will be permenantly damaged and the high end frequencies usually go first.

Of course, don't actually do those things. An interesting factor in the poll might be age. Old people generally can't hear the same frequencies as young people.

Sound dampening material should be very effective on coil whine.
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:D:D

i think the frequency of the coil whine is pretty much just the framerate and its harmonics. since age affects hearing sensitivity for the very high frequencies (>10khz) i'm not sure if its too relevant.
yea tell that to nzxt who decided to have the side panel of the h440 be a huge ass window

@sn1per: yes nvidia branded, blower, don't look cheap like the evga and pny blowers, comes with backplate, havent stressed them yet so not sure about noise but should be identical to 980s. 3x displayport, 1hdmi, 1dvi-i
 
EVGA 04G-P4-2981-KR GeForce GTX980 - http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=04G-P4-2981-KR

That's what I bought over the weekend and installed last night and it's squealing loud in BF4 which is the only game I had time to try. Tonight I'm going to try and loop a benchmark while I'm out of the house for a few hours to see if a burn-in can get rid of it or at least lessen it to an acceptable level.
 
kuhla said:
EVGA 04G-P4-2981-KR GeForce GTX980 - http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=04G-P4-2981-KR

That's what I bought over the weekend and installed last night and it's squealing loud in BF4 which is the only game I had time to try. Tonight I'm going to try and loop a benchmark while I'm out of the house for a few hours to see if a burn-in can get rid of it or at least lessen it to an acceptable level.
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Small update: After running FurMark with main object turned off and FPS around 600 for a couple of hours the coil whine has markedly gone down but it's still too loud. I'm doing another "burn-in" today and if it doesn't go down more then I'll start an RMA with EVGA.
 
kuhla said:
Small update: After running FurMark with main object turned off and FPS around 600 for a couple of hours the coil whine has markedly gone down but it's still too loud. I'm doing another "burn-in" today and if it doesn't go down more then I'll start an RMA with EVGA.
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Last update on this card: Despite many hours of burn in now, the noise has gone down a tiny bit more, but it's still too much. Started RMA process.
 
kuhla said:
Last update on this card: Despite many hours of burn in now, the noise has gone down a tiny bit more, but it's still too much. Started RMA process.
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One last update: Got RMA card back. Put it in. Just as much coil whine. Instead of immediately trying to process another RMA, I decided to try getting a new PSU after I saw someone's post (which I think was in this thread). Went to local Fry's and bought a Corsair AX series. Installed it. Card is dead silent now. Even when playing games that cause the most whine before (BF4). So I guess it was my old Antec TruePower New that was causing the issue.
 
Well when my Gigabyte 970s were whining I was using a Corsair AX1200i. The cards I got back from RMA were much quieter, so it was definitely the cards.

That being said, the AX1200i I used had some coil whine as well, particularly when doing CPU benches, and waking the computer up from sleep. Finally got fed up and bought an AX1500i (mainly for the gratutious amounts of glue used on coils, and also for the Titanium efficiency), and that got rid of the last bits of coil whine in the system.
 
n=1 said:
Well when my Gigabyte 970s were whining I was using a Corsair AX1200i. The cards I got back from RMA were much quieter, so it was definitely the cards.

That being said, the AX1200i I used had some coil whine as well, particularly when doing CPU benches, and waking the computer up from sleep. Finally got fed up and bought an AX1500i (mainly for the gratutious amounts of glue used on coils, and also for the Titanium efficiency), and that got rid of the last bits of coil whine in the system.
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That are some incredible glue blobs right there!
 
If I didn't know any better, I would have thought I got an utterly NG product...
 
Most of the coil whine out there with the 970s are caused by the power supply. Only rarely do people try another one to see if that's the cause.
 
You mean that the PSU was causing the cards to whine or the PSU was the one whining?
 
He meant the PSU was causing the cards to whine.

I can say that in my case the PSU was definitely not the culprit (aside from contributing to some whine itself). The new cards whined much less than the old cards using the same old PSU, and after switching to AX1500i from AX1200i running the same whiny benchmarks still gave the same whine on the new 970s.

And in any case, I'm not sure you can buy anything substantially better than the AX1500i at present, given that multiple sites have said it's basically THE best PSU that money can buy right now.
 
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