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.