Later I changed desks to one that had one of those built in computer cabinets made of thick particle board. That did as much to silence a pc as all the tens of hours of effort I had put into meticulously researching and specc'ing the build before.
Super annoying compared to the rest of the build being a beast of a machine and watercooled that's so quiet I'm more likely to hear the noise floor on speakers than the PC (which is on the desk, next to said speakers).
Fortunately it happens when at high load, which is while playing games. This doesn't help for quiet scenes, though.
Is there a way to fix this sound in video cards? I'll have to investigate.
Most cases made today don’t have any significant dampening material. It’s pretty trivial to add some to the panels without significantly affecting cooling capacity.
That would require making your own GPU PCB, and maybe a year's worth of studying on electronics and power supply design.
A year’s worth of power supply design? Have you looked at the LM7805 datasheet? The circuit is one regulator and two capacitors...
And designing a 250W-capable linear regulator is not as simple as just hooking up a LM7805.
So with a modern CPU and GPU, your talking ~400W of power to the actual components, and nearly 500W wasted in the linear regulators. This of course also means you have to get a 1000W PSU as a bare minimum.
Yeah and good luck driving a 200W linear element (if it even exists, lol) with a few op amps--the driver which should deliver a few amps into the gate/base of the pass element, which in and of itself is a pretty difficult challenge.
LMFAO you can't be any more wrong. You need /much/ more careful design to get GPU-compliant performance. The dI/dt on modern ASICs are insane, and you need an insane regulator to deal with it.
a) Maybe coil whine is an intrinsic factor in the manufacture of graphics cards, similar to dead pixels on displays. "Luck of the draw" when obtaining one is the only way to win. Cycle through RMAs until you get one with little to no coil whine.
b) Or, it depends which company you buy from: each of Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac et al are supposedly better or worse than the others.
c) Or, it's not a problem with the GPU at all; rather, it's an indication of a poor quality power supply (PSU).
I've never seen an informed analysis from an industry engineer who has a goddamn clue what they are talking about. NVIDIA could probably enlighten us all with an exact-science explanation, but that seems unlikely. My uneducated guess is that the situation is closest to option 'a' above, and that rejecting units for coil whine during quality control would drastically reduce production yield.
Instead, ping a few review sites and see if any of them are willing to take a crack at it.
I had a Logitech G500 with awful coil whine and the opposite problem: it would stop whining when moving and start when idle. I suspect it had to do with the power saving mode that lots of mice have, where the laser power supply ramps down to dim the laser illumination after a period of no detected motion.
In the end I went with a Thinkpad and having seen the issues people I know have had with the XPS15 I'm pretty glad I did.
coil whine is highly unnerving while low fan sound is relaxing.
we like stimulus, the clicky keys of my old hp48 is neat, the insertion sequence of pioneer 32x slot-in cd drive was amazingly subtle; not long ago I revived an old HP tape drive, the tape rolling and the head gear was also beautiful.
Also, it was as cute as informative, it's a clear state change side channel. Often software notification about hardware are decoupled so much that you don't trust it; plus they're invasive, unlike a tiny led, a click, a tiny motor ramping up.
I like the sound HDD make when grinding (except when I don't know the reason for the grinding... looking at you svchost.exe).
> coil whine is highly unnerving while low fan sound is relaxing.
Which is why I have been putting off getting a new laptop for years now. Most seem to suffer from coil whines and I can't stand it (to the point I ended up using an old eeepc 1000he rather than a brand new 16 inches VAIO some years ago).
This might be "SuperFetch".
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-...
Now it’s just when the fan on my laptop starts taxiing for takeoff, which can take a lot longer.
However my graphics card (RX 480) is quite loud, and one bearing is making noises.
But the Fractal Design case has really dampened the sound. For my home server, it's using a RM500 (which also never turns the fan on), and a low-profile Noctua CPU cooler. No other fans, but I do hear the 6 HDDs spinning and seeking when it's real quiet in the room.
I don't hear any coil whine, except when using headphones plugged into my desktop's speakers--probably the result of the speaker system's power supply. Klipsch ProMedia, if you're curious.
As far as noise reduction for CPU cooling, I'd suggest buying more air cooling than you need for a modest TDP CPU. Between that and my fanless Seasonic power supply, and SSD, the only noiseI can ever hear from my machines is from the GPU.
I'm looking at buying a new machine soon, and was actually looking at a Fractal Design case with either one of those 2 cooling systems.
This is a Ivy Bridge (IIRC) Core i5 at 4.0GHz.
Seems obvious in hindsight, but I had no fan (pump) speed warning or anything.
I was tired of the never-ending quest for silence, so I bought 3 50-ft dvi cables and a couple usb-3 cables of the same length and put the PC in the attic.
It worked great, except any hardware issues resulted in a trip to the attic.
I work from home, so i'm on it several hours every workday, combined with the fact that I tend to have multiple things in-progress all the time means it would be a giant pain in the ass to shut it down fully.
Still kinda miss that couch.
This was my second silent PC. The first one still had moving disks, but I went for as few fans as possible, and had passive coolers on the internals. This time I did the opposite: lots of fans, but have them spin as slow as possible. This works very well.
But coil whine and electronic hums are easy to overlook when you're choosing parts. It's worth looking at not just the fans and the power use (more power needs more cooling), but also the quality of the electronics.
But when I walk to the backside of my desk I can hear some electronic buzz from one of my monitors. Whats funny about it: I have that monitor since a few years now and before I built that silent PC and turned my desk to another direction, I never noticed the buzz from the monitor :D
I had a Geforce 280 that would scream like hell whenever it was at full power and its framerate went below about 10 or above about 100 FPS. I was glad when it broke some other way and got replaced under warranty.
There are 5 fans in my tower, two on the CPU cooler, only one of those two fans is running constantly, at only 200rpm. All the others aren't running most of the time.
I don't need my computer to run at a cool 30°C all the time. The hardware can run very hot without any issues. And when all the fans eventually kick in under load, it will always keep under 70°C anyway.
And it's doing fine. Its cooling is slightly over-sized since I want to keep fans spinning at very low speed, but I haven't seen much difference compared to when it was outside.