Reducing whine-like noise from GPU?


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Ever since I have had my GTX280, it has always made a pretty decent whine while playing games. I never sent it back in because this was my first experience with such large cards, I didn't know what was acceptable. I have a couple of days before school starts back up and in my extreme boredom, I wanted to see if I could do anything about the whining noise.

Ideas?

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It's most likely whats known as "capacitor whine" and there isn't much you can do about it. I saw somewhere (but don't remember exactly) that using nail polish on top of the capacitors helped some, but not sure I'd try it though.

Edited by CrashGordon
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I worked out that my GPU cooling fan was making a horrid whine. I have a much quieter case fan fitted and just turn that up when necessary. This seems to help keep things cool enough in there that the GPU fan stays at a slower and quieter speed.

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I had a whine coming from my GPU and it was caused by the fan.... I tried to lube it up and it didn't work very good. Then I got a fanless solution for my card, the card is now COOLER and completely silent :)`

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My 4850's fan was terrible when playing games. It sounded like it was going to take off. I got a heatsink (massive but great) and temps dropped from 95C under load to 50C, (but very very slowly rose so no good for long gaming sessions). Then I bought the addon fans which are non audible and temps droped to about 43C load.

?25 but worth the money imo.

The noise is probably because your card has a relatively small fan...

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Its seems your saying the GPU is making a noise when at load not Idle so sure its going to make some noise I was thinking theirs a noise at Idle.

So thee things you can do are:

Water cooling

Sound-proofing

or a better air cooler like Thermalright HR-03-GTX or ARCTIC COOLING Accelero XTREME GTX Pro.

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My card makes the same whine / squealing noise. I have a factory overclocked GTX 260 (XFX Black Edition)

It seems to be related to the capacitors / power management circuitry on the card.

It doesn't happen all of the time however, only seems to happen in some games / intro videos. Just do a google search for 'graphics card squealing' and you'll see quite a few people notice it.

I ignore the noise now.

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My last two graphics card have done this, and it annoyed me at first too :p You get used to the sound eventually though.

Now if I can just find a way to stop my damnable drive bays from vibrating i would be happy :(

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If it's EMI being produced due to your system being on full load etc, try enabling Spread Spectrum (Or even call EMI Noise Reduction) if availible in your BIOS. If you're overclocking, try knocking the overclock down a bit.

I would try a different PSU, your's isn't faulty but some have better shielding than others against the screetching whine noise.

Failing that, you can completely invalidate your warrenty by coating any capacitors in a special resin (Availible from Maplin or any other electrical component/circuit supplier shop). This stops the capacitors resonating, which is what produces the noise.

I would say that it's your GPU putting stress on your PSU and your system doesn't have a great deal of EMI shielding throughout. My Shuttle XPC does it during video encoding.

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i think i also get this issue, when i run folding@home(nvidia) on my graphics card... would like it gone, but cant see it happening.

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