970/980 Coil Whine

Starrbuck said:
I had four different sets of 980s and 970s (six cards total) and never heard it. Here I got accused of being either stupid, deaf, or a liar about it. I think the whole thing was overblown. None of the reviewers mentioned it. We just heard about it because of these forums. People love to have something to b!tch about. ;)
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Glad you you were lucky to get so many cards with out the issue, a lot of us didn't. Why are you still in this thread? You just like to browse a thread about issues you don't have and say others just "love to have something to b!tch about".:rolleyes:

Please post less often.
 
Well i posted a few weeks back about a friend of mine having major coil whine issues (evga), he ran it 24/7 for a week+ and still no-go. First card I see where coil whine didn't even reduce after running warm for a while. Seems like a design problem to me. At any rate it's being RMA'd right now.
 
It looks like something peculiar with the GM204 (particularly the 970 version) since it appears widespread on cards from different manufacturers with different VRM setups.
 
Got two EVGA gtx970's SSC last week and no whining so far. Have a third on the way. seems a bit hit and miss, with quality control problems.
 
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Bigc208 said:
Got two EVGA gtx970's SSC last week and no whining so far. Have a third on the way. seems a bit and miss, with quality control problems.
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coil whine isn't something related to a bad quality control.
a card can start whining in every moment, also after the QA test.

my two GTX980 whine too few to hear them when all fans are on.
 
naticus said:
Glad you you were lucky to get so many cards with out the issue, a lot of us didn't. Why are you still in this thread? You just like to browse a thread about issues you don't have and say others just "love to have something to b!tch about".:rolleyes:

Please post less often.
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Oh, I was very concerned at first when I saw this and had incoming 970 cards. If all we saw were reports of whining, we'd think they all whined, and that is clearly not true and the reason for my post.

As far as the last part, I'll post when I want and as often as I want, and there's nothing you can do about it.
 
Update #2

Very odd,

So as I have said before... toggling off Furry Object produced noise for me but now it is complete silent. I can not hear a thing.
BUT, there is every so slight, very very extremely low level of coil whine noise (i have to get close and concentrate to hear it) with the Furry Object is ON.
Which is odd because in the beginning furry object toggled on never produced any noise.

Same result whether i overclock or run at stock.

Anyways... no more complains now... unless there truly is some sort of hardware issues with this concern.

Hope everybody get quiet card(s) so you can all focus on gaming.
 
Just got my MSI GTX780 Gaming installed. Running 344.48 (threads at msi blame that driver for some issues): no whine; fans work as expected.

One small issue: Afterburner v4.0 shows the fan speed % correctly, but the tach does not give good rpm.

Edited to add: my card is revision 1.1.
 
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So 10 hours of gaming later and I noticed something interesting. It appears that the coil whine has now become a temperature dependent phenomenon.

Previously the only surefire way to make the cards stop whining was to cap or drop FPS below 80, but now it seems as long as the cards have warmed up enough (literally), I can push 100+ frames and they'd still be whine free. The threshold temp seems to be around 55C, since just staying on any game's main menu and having the card push 700+ FPS but not heat up above 50C doesn't get rid of whining. Cards still whine audibly when I just fire up a game, but literally 2 minutes later when they've reached 55+C the whine goes away.

Ironically heat has become my friend in my case rofl (pun intended).
 
Starrbuck said:
I had four different sets of 980s and 970s (six cards total) and never heard it. Here I got accused of being either stupid, deaf, or a liar about it. I think the whole thing was overblown. None of the reviewers mentioned it. We just heard about it because of these forums.
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Bladestorm said:
It took me six tries to find two cards without coil whine. :mad: Good luck guys.
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well the only logical explanation for this is batch to batch variance...

starrbuck have you tried furmark without furry and WEI?

i think it's more prevalent than it appears from newegg reviews or whatever, because if your system is not very quiet, it can be hard to hear during normal gaming.

People love to have something to b!tch about. ;)
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yup :D
 
i just ctrl+f "whine" and went through newegg reviews for the various gtx 970, counting how many reviewers experience any sort of coil whine. i didn't count those for whom the coil whine went away after some use.
MSI GTX 970 GAMING 4G
16/89

GIGABYTE GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD
13/77

ZOTAC ZT-90101-10P
5/45

EVGA 04G-2974-KR
15/43

ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5
7/39

EVGA 04G-2975-KR
6/20

GIGABYTE GV-N970WF3OC-4GD
0/19
(these reviewers don't seem to be as wary of coil whine as the others. only 2 mentioned that the card didn't have whine)

MSI GTX 970 4GD5T
2/13

ZOTAC ZT-90102-10P
1/13

ZOTAC ZT-90103-10P
0/6







gtx 980:

EVGA 04G-2982-KR
0/30

MSI GTX 980 GAMING 4G
0/29

GIGABYTE GV-N980G1 GAMING-4GD
0/15

ZOTAC ZT-90202-10P
0/12

ZOTAC AMP! ZT-90204-10P
0/10

EVGA 04G-2983-KR
0/8

PNY VCGGTX9804XPB-CG
1/6
I thought it would be completely exempt of coil whine but I noticed some while running 3DMark benchmarks in occasional 500 fps+ circumstances. But when gaming, every game I've tried (many), there's no coil-whine at all.
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ZOTAC AMP! Extreme ZT-90203-10P
0/5
 
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This ties in very nicely with my theory that the lack of a reference board for 970 might be to blame for the coil whine issues.

That and the reason 980 costs more is not because of performance but because you don't have to play the coil whine roulette. ;)
 
Looks like the percentage of people who experience the coil whine among the different manufacturers is pretty similar. Give or take some random sample size differences. You can't always go by forums since the most popular brand will be marked as the one with the most problems simply because more people have it therefore more people will also have the whine.

I will say though I'm really surprised by EVGA. A company that was making solid video cards just really messed up on the 970. They really hurt their reputation with the 970s with the heatsink design issues to coil whines.
 
flod said:
well the only logical explanation for this is batch to batch variance...

starrbuck have you tried furmark without furry and WEI?
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I don't know if that is the "only" logical explanation, but it certainly is a good theory.

Yes, I used Furmark with and without furry effects and WEI. Haven't heard nary a peep out of any of my cards I had or have.

flod said:
i just ctrl+f "whine" and went through newegg reviews for the various gtx 970, counting how many reviewers experience any sort of coil whine. i didn't count those for whom the coil whine went away after some use.
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How many people who did not post a review did or did not experience coil whine??
 
^^^

I posted no reviews. Bought my card at Amazon through the [H] link. I was going to post in the MSI forums, but I thought their registration form was too intrusive.

TLDR: Very satisfied, but not posted any user reviews on purchase site(s).
 
^^^

Exactly my point. The statistics are pretty meaningless unless more people post reviews. In fact, they tend to lean to the negative side since people who are happy don't often go post about it, mostly just people having issues.
 
its obviously not hard data as the reviewers are not representative of the entire population. but that doesn't make it meaningless, for the same reason we don't say that the anecdotal "data" from forum posts are meaningless

the two main conclusions are: evga 970s are the worst and gtx 980s in general have fewer issues
 
flod said:
its obviously not hard data as the reviewers are not representative of the entire population. but that doesn't make it meaningless, for the same reason we don't say that the anecdotal "data" from forum posts are meaningless

the two main conclusions are: evga 970s are the worst and gtx 980s in general have fewer issues
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Not necessarily. Do you know how many 970s have been sold vs. 980s? What if, for example, 10,000 970s have been sold but only 1,000 980s have been sold? That would be 10x more possibilities of problems to be reported and skew the results to the detriment of the 970.
 
Starrbuck said:
Not necessarily.
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of course.
make what you will of the data. it's obviously biased due to various factors like what you mentioned, but again that doesn't mean it's useless or meaningless.


these are my inferences from my own experiences, the posts here, youtube videos, and the newegg reviews. they're just my guesses.

1. most or all coil whine becomes more audible at high framerates (>500) which isn't common while gaming, but is common when looking at game menus and when benchmarking.
2. most gtx 980's have absolutely no coil whine.
3. most gtx 970's have minor coil whine, which isn't distracting while gaming, but can be easily audible when benchmarking or in a game's menu where the fps is high.
4. evga's gtx 970's coil whine is louder than the others.

naticus said:
Nope, it's all in our heads remember. :rolleyes:
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what's in my head is the fact that my previous graphics card (some shitty gtx 460) had absolutely no coil whine under any circumstance, and the fact that some people in here have perfect cards.
 
No doubt about it. The 970's are more prone to coil whine than other cards. Component selection, not necessarily "quality", appears to make some difference.
 
Should mention, I've had the mis twinfrozr 980 and a PNY reference gtx 980 and they are both experiencing coil whine. I'm more surprised that the reference cards experiencing coil whine. The Zotac I have now, also a reference doesn't seem to be experiencing this problem.
 
I had to RMA an ASUS GTX 970 Strix this week that had really bad coil whine.

I uploaded a short video here.

Newegg was pretty good with the return, provided a UPS label, and upgraded it to priority for free.
 
Jfoul said:
I had to RMA an ASUS GTX 970 Strix this week that had really bad coil whine.

I uploaded a short video here.

Newegg was pretty good with the return, provided a UPS label, and upgraded it to priority for free.
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I RMA'ed a Gigabyte with coil whine and they did not offer a pre paid label. Maybe I need to be more persistent next time. Oh well.
 
My new Asus 970 is really quiet. Bf4 80-100fps, high temp 64, fan at 30% on Ultra settings.
 
fdiaz78 said:
I RMA'ed a Gigabyte with coil whine and they did not offer a pre paid label. Maybe I need to be more persistent next time. Oh well.
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Standard policy, they only pay for shipping one way (from them to you).

Talking about RMAing to Gigabyte directly btw.
 
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If you're on Newegg Premier, you get free return shipping and there's no restocking fee. (Yes, even on video cards.)
 
Yes I realized that, which is why I added the clarification. Am I missing something here?
 
n=1 said:
Yes I realized that, which is why I added the clarification. Am I missing something here?
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Jfoul was talking about a Newegg return, fdias78 replied about a Newegg return, and I replied about Newegg returns. Then you were talking about returning directly to Gigabyte in your reply to fdias78.

So... we're good. :)
 
You're telling me what I already know. -_- Hence why I added the clarification once I realized I was talking about something else. Anyway let's move on.
 
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Has there been any real word on whether the vendors are going to release revised designs to address this issue? I saw the comments about Gigabyte v1.1. Is it confirmed that the rev addresses coil whine. Any other info about hardware revisions coming out for any of the cards?

A friend of mine just had to return an EVGA 970 FTW that sounded like the ASUS in the video that Jfoul posted.
 
88records said:
Should mention, I've had the mis twinfrozr 980 and a PNY reference gtx 980 and they are both experiencing coil whine. I'm more surprised that the reference cards experiencing coil whine. The Zotac I have now, also a reference doesn't seem to be experiencing this problem.
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thanks for reporting... guess there is some truth to the idea that the 970 has gotten more whine attention because it's being sold more
 
waderunner said:
Has there been any real word on whether the vendors are going to release revised designs to address this issue? I saw the comments about Gigabyte v1.1. Is it confirmed that the rev addresses coil whine. Any other info about hardware revisions coming out for any of the cards?
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None that I have seen. Unofficial reports are that revision numbers can change simply when they use different parts from other suppliers for various reasons.

With that said, I'm glad I got rev 1.1 cards. :)
 
After a month and going through 3 sets of 970s I finally have a pair that doesn't have coil whine or loud buzzing. The 30 day trial of Newegg Premier came in handy for paid shipping return labels and no restocking fee.
 
After a month and going through 3 sets of 970s I finally have a pair that doesn't have coil whine or loud buzzing.
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Way to persist :) Smart move to get the Premier trial. How many cards did you actually go through? 6 to get 2 without coil whine?

Did you stick to the same brand, or did you try changing brands? Which model did you end up with?
 
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