Bad memory?: Strange buzzing noise during COD4/intense gaming

[lightprocess]

I'm not entirely sure where this thread belong, as at this point I'm unsure whether or not I'm dealing with a hardware or software problem. Here goes:

My faithful Shuttle of four year recently passed, and I've thrown together a new machine to take its place. Both machines have been using for gaming, in particular, TF2 and COD4. On the Shuttle, I had recently upgraded the ram to 2gigs of Corsair XMS (184-pin) to extend its life (nuts). I had tweaked the timings from 3-3-3-8 to 2.5-3-3-6, and for the most part the memory worked fine. However, any lower would cause COD4 and the entire system to crash during intense gameplay, the only symptom being a loud, continuous buzzing noise eminating from my speakers.

My new computer has been experiencing a similar quirk; during intense gameplay (COD4 and Bioshock) my speakers would produce the same buzzing, but only for around half a second, if that long. It's brief, and doesn't crash my computer, but it's enough to make me wonder what it could be.

Obviously I suspect the memory, however I haven't messed with it yet in my new machine. At this point I'm simply having a difficult time just coming up with search queries for possible reasons for the strange noise.

Rough and relevant(?) old and new computer specs are as follows. Both machines had up-to-date video drivers.

Old:
Northwood P4 @ 3.0 (stock)
2x1 Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-6 (3-3-3-8 stock)
Sapphire x800 GTO (stock)
An old Shuttle mobo
300 watt psu
Win XP

New:
Q6600 (stock)
2x2 Corsair XMS 5-5-5-18 (stock)
XFX 8800 GT 512mb
ASUS P5E
520 watt psu
Win XP

Thanks for reading. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Justintoxicated]

I would link it to the sound card if coming through your speakers, if coming through your MB speaker I would suspect the MB before memory.

If your using onboard sound or even a sound card, buying a cheap sound card to test with (maybe one that you can return for free) would be where I would look first.

When PCs crash they can make all kinds of strange noises this is not necessarily related to the noise you are hearing now.

If you want to test the memory your going to simply need to run memtest86 and check for errors, but I highly doubt memory is the culprit to a buzzing noise.

 

[lightprocess]

Thanks for the reply. Both systems had sound cards; an Audigy 2 and a blueGears b-enspirer.