In my power electronics class we learned that coil whine is due to what's called "sub-harmonic oscillation." From what I remember it's an instability of the operation of the power stage brought about by a design oversight in its control scheme. The end result is that the switching frequency occasionally drops below the intended frequency and sometimes into the audible range. My professor really emphasized that a properly designed power stage should never buzz or whine, regardless of the inductors used.
this is why the 4090 founder's edition and MSI and ASUS cards have coil whine. Because after 20 years of making video cards, none of the engineers know what they're doing. Furthermore the reason Palit and Gigabyte 4090 cards don't have coil whine is they used cheap and crappy components which through sheer dumb luck do not have this resonance and so don't have coil whine. why is everyone so stupid? I'm thrilled this video exists and I can superglue the inductors in place to fix their idiocy
@@CalvinJary I'd feel very uncomfortable taking apart a $1600 card. Coil Whine is one of the most annoying things and yet they don't do anything about it.
@@CalvinJary asus desgin pcb so they look pretty and are overkill so people overpay for things that doesnt matter if u dont ln2, msi have really wierd pcb they are way too large and looks wierd and empty so they arent that good at it imo, other brands make pcbs so they are small (it does matter then u watercool) and people dont RMA cards just because something buzz often u can take does pcb and solder extra caps so they become even better. Just dont overpay for shit gpu brands buy gigabyte, gainward, zotac maybe palit byt 30 series form them was much better than 40 series (its really bad). Its worth to buy mobos form msi and asus because u need good vrms for cpus and good memory oc and bios matter. Then u buy gpu always try to buy the ones with black inductors, small pcb, good cooler and dual bios.
I watercooled my pc, all open loop, bunch of noctuas, now the coil whine is by far the loudest part of my system during gaming. Yeah it is a vega 64 on an ek waterblock, but still. Luckily it is only during gaming, with more consistent loads the coils are virtually silent.
@@jadoei13 Same - I modded watercooling into my MXM 1080 SLI laptop and instead of 50-60dBa fans and 85C, I get 50C and no fan noise (external 3x120 rad with its silent 1200rpms) but now all I hear is buzzing coils. Scared the sheet out of me and took a while to convince myself it was safe
Coil whine is the result of the mechanical vibrations caused by the varying electromagnetic forces exerted on the coil components. The frequency of these vibrations is the frequency of the variation of the electromagnetic forces which is equal to the frequency of changing of the magnetic field created by the flow of current through the windings which varies according to the gpu load. This therefore happens at a frequency tied to the frame rate which falls within the audible spectrum. Also, obviously, the higher the frame rate the higher the vibration frequency and the higher the pitch of the emitted sound; thus the term 'whining'.
can't we get gamersnexus to do professional coil whine testing between inductors and possible solutions etc... importantly testing of whine characteristics instead of general sound level testing, which gn already did for i believe fans.
i guess Im randomly asking but does any of you know a method to log back into an Instagram account..? I somehow lost the password. I would appreciate any tips you can offer me
Coil whining can be such a pain. My GTX 770 had some coil whining. Weirdly enough, changing the power supply fixed mostly that issue. And no the coil whining didnt come from the powersupply.
Yeah, my 1070 had pretty loud coil whine in some cases with my old psu, i got myself a new one and it’s almost completely gone (audible under load through mic with high gain, the sound itself is very high pitched). I have no idea why it’s gone, but my theory is that my new psu is able to push power to my gpu more consistently and w/o huge drops.
We live in 2018 and it's a shame that we have to deal with coil whine in GPU's or in the PS4. The Products are expensive and the Producer should find a way to get rid of it
Well you kinda can't defy physics though, more powerful card equal to more power equal to more whining because there are more current flowing through the coil.
Try turning on the automated captions for that one. It gets coil whine right three times in the video. Others include: coil line, coil wine, oil wine, oil line, coil Wayne, ...
Thank you so much, now I have a better understanding why coil-wine varies in sound whilst playing games that render abnormal high FPS. Especially on old titles. Very helpful.
would you mine sharing more details about the method that you used to fix the coil whine? Like how exactly did you apply the hot glue and in what amount? I have a Gigabyte blower style 1080ti with a Kraken G12 bracket on it and it whines pretty badly whenever my games go above 90FPS.
@@hhiram it's just EMI (electromagnetic interference) , more gpu/cpu load = more electric current = more EMI = more audio noise, your best bet to reduce it is to buy separate DAC and AMP, or you could buy a motherboard with separate audio circuitry.
@@rachmatzulfiqar Thanks! yeah i was able to fix it... most of the buzzing came through my audio interface while playing games but if i use the aux from the pc itself there is no more buzzing.
I had a wall-wart from China that had some annoying coil whine...so I slapped a magnet on it. It was fun tuning the harmonics of the coil whine with the magnet, until I found the sweet spot to dial down the noise completely.
Hey man, love your videos, your technical knowledge of computer components and the theory behind electronics is far beyond anyone else in the computer tech field here on UA-cam. Would love a video on minimising EMI/EMF by knowing what to pick and what to avoid when it comes to motherboards, PSU's, CPU overclocks/frequencies/settings to avoid, how the frequencies of graphics cards, CPU's and RAM can create more EMI/EMF, cross-talk between components picked up by the on-board audio interface, DIY shielding and things like that, I'm sure it'd go down well with audio/visual professionals as well as health conscious computer users, and could get a lot of views from those niche groupst. Cheers!
A metal case, without a window, is a good Faraday cage if your computer is correctly grounded. But you know computers doesn't emit a lot and they are quite resilient to EMI, even in open cases. There are noms for that, IIRC Australian ones are the most constraining for EMI. But if you care about that, what you should beware is the shielding of your domestic electricity cables especially if you use Homeplug PLC.
@@PainterVierax My main system is in a fully enclosed steel case, although it does have small ventilation holes at the top. The PC emits quite a large amount of EMI, measurable both with a low frequency meter, and also picked up by musical instruments pickups. I've got it plugged into a power condition which has a torodial copper transformer to clean up "dirty electricity" noise but it's still not perfect. I'm thinking of getting a Fractal R2 XL case for my next build since it is heavy with thick steel walls, and perhaps even adding additional copper or aluminium mesh screen to the inside of the case.
You know, if I didn't have the hands on experience with coils I couldn't talk about it and be taken seriously, but I've actually built my own hand wound coils for different projects without using any glue or whatever, I just wound my coils very neat and very tight as possible doing it by hand but I never had any of my coils producing any noticeable sound at any frequency up to about 4 or 5 MHz... Crazy right? Some of the coils I made are just a little bit bigger than what you used to show in your video, the biggest coil I made is loosely wound on an old flyback that I'm playing with at the moment, I know it's not comparable with graphics card coils at all but it's a coil, also I made my own inductor which goes in between the flyback and the power supplies and that one does have a specific function in my case and I found out it needed to be wound in a specific way to get it to perform as good as it does now without making any noise or getting warm, however I still didn't have to use any resin, glue or whatever to hold the windings together... Believe me I'm pushing a lot of amps through the inductor and the flyback coil, the output of my ZVS driver and flyback is about 100kV to 150kV and the plasma arc is white hot, about 10mm thick, I can pull about 100mm to 150mm white hot plasma arcs with my ZVS driver it's really crazy and very dangerous but I just find it fascinating to look at how it reacts with different stuff, blowing up stuff, even making beautiful figures in wood called lichtenberg figures with it... it's a lot of fun if you know what you're doing. Not really related to this video but I always think about my high voltage projects automatically whenever I see or hear something or someone talking about coils and I get excited so I just wanted to share that, LOL. Best regards.
Finally someone talking about coil whine where it actually happens. People keep saying that coil whine are the sounds of fan spinning but is the inductor coil vibrating at a frequency that sounds like a whine.
Well in fact, fans can be noisy too because of their circuitry. A fan with crappy PWM filtering will give a square signal to the motor and it will produce noise. For strict DC fans, it can also be eared with cheap rheobuses which use bad PWM signal or have bad filtering instead of a proper linear voltage stepdown converter.
i have never seen anyone saying 'coil whine' has anything to do with fans (though they do have coils), must be younger people on youtube or reddit watercooled people very often mention coil whine, instantly disproving fans
yeah, I had mixed feelings about hot gluing the Vcore inductors on the M5A97 (Rev 1.0). the thing sounds like a flock of random angry birds when the FX8350 is idle or the system is in the bios. And it is loud enough to be audible from the other end of the house. I put a dab of hot glue on the base of the inductors and it didn't change anything, I ended up just stuffing deep-cone anechoic chamber sound absorber foam in the case above the VRM to keep the noise from being reflected out of the case. It reduced the noise to the point it was no longer audible from the other end of the house, it did not eliminate the noise tho. Great vid BZ. B)
@@ActuallyHardcoreOverclocking Coil whine is a huge problem on some of the ultra-thin laptops (Dell XPS etal). Trying some mitigation on those laptops, such as high-temp silicone on the inductors, would be an interesting branch out. I haven't seen anyone trying a "hardware" solution in the laptop space.
You're like Mr. Wizard for us tech nerds. Everytime I watch one of your ramblings I feel like I walk away with something that is useful (to me) .. whether it's useful or not in practicality that's not certain, but definitely appeals to my 'inner hacker' .. where I just like to know how it actually works.
The revised instructions for my EK block for my 2080ti FE included adding pads to the coils. After I had added those pads all coil whine did disappear.
also had a 980 with miss-applied Liquid metal. Clean the socket with a brush under almost cooking water. No joke. If you clean all the shortening-stuff away, it will probably run again. Mine did.
My XFX 7970 used to audibly whine in high fps menus but it was never audible while gaming. I have a Asus 1060 now and it doesn't whine at all so it sounds like you were right about them using moulded inductors.
I had my first coil whine problem almost a year ago. It coincided that I bought a reference GTX 760 and a sound card together. I could hear a very strange whistle from the headphones while playing, which varied according to the load of the GPU. I went half crazy until I found out what that was. In my case I solved it by changing to a quality PSU.
I have one of the Powercolor R9 290x's and it doesn't whine at all really. It's been a great card too, runs pretty cool, then again anything runs cooler than the reference 290x.
Opening the transmog tab in WoW made my old Sapphire card sound like a police car driving down the street and made my gpu core temp shoot up . I have a 1070 Strix now and it's completely silent when opening the same tab
Only time I ever had a "Coil Whine" was with an under performing power supply. Was using a 600 watt ThermalTake and went with a 750 watt and problem solved!
My Asus dual 2080 ti on ek block screams. Tried bran new 850 and 1200 watt psu, didn't matter. They say LR22 on them. I measure GPU core voltage and the whining correlates with it, higher voltage louder whine
Probably should have found this video before buying a new psu. Haha. Thankfully i wanted a psu.. but at least for the last few months i could have kept my stuff overclocked as i down clocked everything thinking my psu was gonna blow . 🤣 Thank you for the info. Vids like this help me understand my pc and usually stop me freaking out that stuff isnt actually being damaged or anything.
Problem is the glue only helps with low frequencies not high in kHz. I have electronics that are just a ATTiny13 with resistor, cap, and it will still whine in some use cases while in others it's silent and that's when using 18kHz+ PWM on it, yeah even then have one case that still audibly whines. As long as there is any switching, PWM and decent power/current being used, it can whine in some situation, doesn't need inductors to do it but those can indeed be a prime source on PC components.
I got a Powercolor Red Devil RX480 which produced a higher pitched coil whined at around 200 fps. I returned the card for the ASUS Strix RX 480. It too whined at very high FPS but at a lower frequency. However, as time went on they stopped and ran quietly.
I love your videos Buildzoid! These "Ramblings" videos are always the most informative and seem to almost always teach me something new - Like your semi-recent video about RAM and how to mathmatically calculate real world speeds using frequency and timings! Strange question however - Do you still that Gigabyte board and AMD FX 8 Core CPU from that overclocking video you did awhile back? I'm actually rather curious to see how the FX 8 Core series fairs (realistically say if your monitor only supports say 1920x1200@60hz) with something like a 1080ti - Just how usable is it in 2019? And more importantly how does it fair when the user disables 4 cores - How much more general gaming/work can be done vs having all 8 Cores running?
I had coil whine rear its ugly head in the most ungodly loud way on my fury x the other day, whilst playing X4 Foundations. Had to lower settings, limit frame rate to 30 and crank fan speeds up to keep it under control.
my Gtx 1070 has horrible coil while. I tried to fix it with glue but did not help at all. Thought more glue could fix it. Wroooong. Now I have a horrid looking PCB but at least it still works. (did it 1 year ago)
@buildzoid thank you for this very informative video! There are still two questions i would like to ask you: 1.: There are stories about the internet that some cards become less whiny after some time of usage. Is there any explanation for this? All i can imagine after your video is cards that get louder, not the other way around. 2.: How exactly does the power supply have impact on the coil whine? This in fact i experienced myself, using two different power supplies can obiously change coil whine noticeably. Maybe you can further explain things like this in future videos, it's very interesting :)
The few Asus Strix 1080Ti's I've had all had the exact same coil whine. I tracked it down to the input filter inductors which are of the molded style. I mitigated it by smothering them in nail polish and filling the area around them with cotton fill when installing the EKWB. It still whines but much reduced to the point I can't hear it while gaming.
The important part you don't really explain explicitly is that anything solid is liable to crack, the key is having the coil in a flexible medium so that it can vibrate without cracking and separating from the housing.
i've got a coil whine problem with my build, for a long time. 4670k + 1060 (both OCed) + old (shitty) psu (460w total, 360w for 12V line). coil whine was only gpu related - i've heard it in furmark, all the times, and sometimes - in games. since i changed PSU - no problem at all. no coil whine. 12v ripple, as i understand?
I have an old Sapphire HD4890 it doesn't have coil whine it has coil 'rattle' Interestingly the coil whine is in sync with framerate and at low FPS under high load it makes sounds like a rattlesnake. Apparently it was normal on the Sapphire Vapor-X HD4890 2GB. Still bizarre
I have read that "Neutral Cure Silicone" seems to be less corrosive than "normal" silicone or hot glue. Some claim the neutral cure silicone provides better vibration control and decent adhesion. I have a ton of electronics with PCB damage from mystery hot glue that deteriorated and/or became conductive. Any recommendations for mitigating coil whine?
Well one of the properties of the potting compounds they use for encasing the inductors within that ferrite housing, is that the resin they use has a higher thermal conductivity. SO that the coils, however little heat they are producing, are not wrapped in an insulator. Whereby the temperature of the coil has nowhere to go, and keeps on rising until eventually burning out / failing. So maybe if silicone is too thermally insulative, then it cannot be used for the potting compound. I'm not sure of the other reason(s). Hopefully in the future, at least one manufacturer will put the work in to economically engineer and produce better chokes. Which would help to go a long way towards mitigating this common issue. Anyhow thank you Buildzoid for this video. It has been really helpful / informative. As I understand it was not something that affects you very much.
You can make in silicon inductances and capacitance, those parts just tend to not be very space efficient. Look at the space taken by the external inductors and image adding multiple of that to the GPU die. Doesnt really work
I'm hearing people complaining about Z390 Aorus Master coil whine. Is the verdict ready, which ones have better or quieter vrm, Master or the cheaper Gigabyte boards like Ultra or Pro? Also is the Asus Hero XI as bad as initially thought? I have a 9900k sitting on a table, long waiting for Gigabyte boards but Hero boards on stock right now.
Is it possible that the electric system where I live is causing my GPU to coil whine ? I just built a new PC and every single GPU i put in it coil whines. 1080 MSI GamingX and two RX 580 Nitro+ 8gb cards(not crossfire), all brand new, all of them coil whined. The AMD cards coil whined a lot less than the nVidia, but still pretty surprising that they did. This is the rest of the system: Seasonic Focus+ 550W Gold+ R5 2600 Corsair 2x8gb LPX DDR4 3000Mhz AsRock B450 Gaming K4 Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB The PSU doesn't coil whine, its always the GPU. Help please.
He just told you that the inductors on the video cards are the ones vibrating. You should had just returned those faulty products and ask for your money back. This is what we should ALL do, so to tell the manufacturers we won't accept these kind of practices and lack of quality.
Just wondering wouldn't the coil whine also impact the psu as it should have the same load variance supplying the gpu? Or are the inductors used there generally not susceptible to coil whine?
My BFG 9800 GT Eco had horrendous coil whine under Any load, and I recently discovered my AMD Frontier Edition has coil whine under max load. Shame....
My damned Cooler Master V700 started to whine a few months ago. It is 5+ years old at this point, but the only coils in it are the big ass type wound around a metal ring... In the past year or so every damn component that i had, has produced a whine to varying degrees. A GTX 980Ti, ASUS MAximus VI Hero, EVGAGTX 580 DS OC, GTX 570, ASUS HD 7970 DC OC and now a MSI GTX1080 and my PSU. So damn annoying and i am very sensitive to it. Forget the components, why did the PSU start whining ?
Both my 290X and Vega 64 have minor amounts of whine. Generally it happens in menus and things where the GPU is doing 500-1000 FPS. But with most gaming scenarios there is little to no whine. Radeon Chill should eliminate most if not all of it.
Unfortunately, you left out the most important coil whine sources, where it is the most annoying: Laptops. And because laptops are so flat, I guess there is a bunch of coils used which also are small and tend to coil whine more, than these cube sized ones, which arent found in laptops I think. So please make another video on laptop coil too and how to fix it. I actually found, that if you put some kind of thermal pad on/around the coils, it reduces the whine too mostly by sound wave absorption. It also looks to me, coil whine in laptops is totally different to explain because they mostly happen in idle situations and not under load situations. My Dell XPS 15 9570, for example, has a bunch of coil whine under specific situations. One is periodic for example happening every 2 seconds for a short time. Then there are lots of "crackling" sounds while loading a web page. Then there is a "mice like" noise when I do boot up or if I open a specific setting window under Windows (the boot timeout and kernel memory dump window, have no idea why it produces a coil whine but it does).
@@kn00tcn ... coil whine is THE most annoying thing on laptops. Especially on Dell XPS line since years. It mostly just happens with high-end laptops because of the larger current flow (45W CPU and then 75W GPU or even more), so if you have a potato laptop you obviously never heard about it. Also a lot of newer NVMe SSDs tend to coil whine.
@@bestonyoutube i have a gaming one with 45w i7 something w gtx, 180w power brick but how can i hear coil whine if the fan is making a sound? i do hear the hard drive when listening closely have you heard it outside of dell? not that i dont trust you, i just like statistics & measurements, might even start asking others for mic recordings (edit: i intentionally didnt list exact cpu/gpu, but i'm very familiar with tower pc hw over the past decade, just dont interact with many laptops other than normie ones or my highish end for its time one, have clearly heard various noises from multiple desktop gpus due to the quiet 120 & up fans)
@@kn00tcn Lol... it is all about when the fans are OFF/low obviously. ua-cam.com/video/blyswNKEPEY/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/NGPBzzxDFfE/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/LLV4tQ-6iiE/v-deo.html (just google yourself...)
@@bestonyoutube so far dell sucks, need to see other brands (you dont have to search for me now) the second video was near the monitor, that might be the backlight hum, my 2008 CCFL monitor has a hum that changes in tone or intensity (not necessarily pitch) when i change brightness, though that might have appeared in the last few years of old age
In my power electronics class we learned that coil whine is due to what's called "sub-harmonic oscillation." From what I remember it's an instability of the operation of the power stage brought about by a design oversight in its control scheme. The end result is that the switching frequency occasionally drops below the intended frequency and sometimes into the audible range.
My professor really emphasized that a properly designed power stage should never buzz or whine, regardless of the inductors used.
this is why the 4090 founder's edition and MSI and ASUS cards have coil whine. Because after 20 years of making video cards, none of the engineers know what they're doing. Furthermore the reason Palit and Gigabyte 4090 cards don't have coil whine is they used cheap and crappy components which through sheer dumb luck do not have this resonance and so don't have coil whine. why is everyone so stupid? I'm thrilled this video exists and I can superglue the inductors in place to fix their idiocy
@@CalvinJary I'd feel very uncomfortable taking apart a $1600 card. Coil Whine is one of the most annoying things and yet they don't do anything about it.
@@CalvinJary asus desgin pcb so they look pretty and are overkill so people overpay for things that doesnt matter if u dont ln2, msi have really wierd pcb they are way too large and looks wierd and empty so they arent that good at it imo, other brands make pcbs so they are small (it does matter then u watercool) and people dont RMA cards just because something buzz often u can take does pcb and solder extra caps so they become even better. Just dont overpay for shit gpu brands buy gigabyte, gainward, zotac maybe palit byt 30 series form them was much better than 40 series (its really bad). Its worth to buy mobos form msi and asus because u need good vrms for cpus and good memory oc and bios matter. Then u buy gpu always try to buy the ones with black inductors, small pcb, good cooler and dual bios.
i would have called the video whining about about coil whine
I watercooled my pc, all open loop, bunch of noctuas, now the coil whine is by far the loudest part of my system during gaming. Yeah it is a vega 64 on an ek waterblock, but still. Luckily it is only during gaming, with more consistent loads the coils are virtually silent.
missed opportunity
@@jadoei13 Same - I modded watercooling into my MXM 1080 SLI laptop and instead of 50-60dBa fans and 85C, I get 50C and no fan noise (external 3x120 rad with its silent 1200rpms) but now all I hear is buzzing coils. Scared the sheet out of me and took a while to convince myself it was safe
Arnie: "Stop whining."
Coil whine is the result of the mechanical vibrations caused by the varying electromagnetic forces exerted on the coil components. The frequency of these vibrations is the frequency of the variation of the electromagnetic forces which is equal to the frequency of changing of the magnetic field created by the flow of current through the windings which varies according to the gpu load. This therefore happens at a frequency tied to the frame rate which falls within the audible spectrum. Also, obviously, the higher the frame rate the higher the vibration frequency and the higher the pitch of the emitted sound; thus the term 'whining'.
can't we get gamersnexus to do professional coil whine testing between inductors and possible solutions etc...
importantly testing of whine characteristics instead of general sound level testing, which gn already did for i believe fans.
Yes.
i guess Im randomly asking but does any of you know a method to log back into an Instagram account..?
I somehow lost the password. I would appreciate any tips you can offer me
@Zachary Dariel instablaster :)
Coil whining can be such a pain. My GTX 770 had some coil whining. Weirdly enough, changing the power supply fixed mostly that issue. And no the coil whining didnt come from the powersupply.
Yeah I've also had that happen with some cards.
Yeah, my 1070 had pretty loud coil whine in some cases with my old psu, i got myself a new one and it’s almost completely gone (audible under load through mic with high gain, the sound itself is very high pitched). I have no idea why it’s gone, but my theory is that my new psu is able to push power to my gpu more consistently and w/o huge drops.
@@fioletoviymewok9665 Could be lower voltage ripple, reducing the resonation in the coils
Better powersuppys
Lest voltage variation
Less harmonics
Less wine
Koeras from what type and brand of psu did you went from and to?
Nice job pulling out that HD 7970 card for reference. Examples and an explanation are awesome!
18:37 "And that's basically all I have to say"... Goes for another 6 minutes...
He loves hearing himself speak. Some people are like that. He repeats everything he says around 5 times. Tedious.
@@BenderdickCumbersnatch I doubt that's the case but ok
Thanks for the video! Very informative and helps dispels some of those annoying PCMR myths.
this was very interesting and well explained. much appreciated
We live in 2018 and it's a shame that we have to deal with coil whine in GPU's or in the PS4. The Products are expensive and the Producer should find a way to get rid of it
Well you kinda can't defy physics though, more powerful card equal to more power equal to more whining because there are more current flowing through the coil.
@@rachmatzulfiqar Clearly not... Did you not watch the video?
@@nicknic28292490 my point is, more powerful card need more power = more current flow through = more chance to have coil whine,
@starshipeleven yes but do people want to pay 100$ extra for a card or go for a cheaper one with the same performance?
@starshipeleven It's not so terrible as people think it is. It comes down per person so it is quite subjective
i was waiting for this since forever ! thank you.
Try turning on the automated captions for that one. It gets coil whine right three times in the video. Others include:
coil line, coil wine, oil wine, oil line, coil Wayne, ...
Thank you so much, now I have a better understanding why coil-wine varies in sound whilst playing games that render abnormal high FPS. Especially on old titles. Very helpful.
My 1080Ti Armor coil whine badly.. has those sfc inductors. Hot glue fixed it...
so they do. I've just usually had it happen with the SMD types.
My 1080 armor only whines when I start Fortnite and nothing else
so you desolder it and filled it up with hotglue?
hahahahaha ... nope its already filled !! WITH METAL ... otherwise it would not operate :D
would you mine sharing more details about the method that you used to fix the coil whine? Like how exactly did you apply the hot glue and in what amount? I have a Gigabyte blower style 1080ti with a Kraken G12 bracket on it and it whines pretty badly whenever my games go above 90FPS.
I was never afraid of coil whine. I knew what it was but didnt know how fps was related in such technical detail. Love his videos!
My 1070 FTW sounded like shaking a glass jar full of marbles under load. Card ran fine, but man was that a disconcerting noise.
Were you able to fix this? I have the same gpu and same issue but its coming out of my speakers.
v-sync kinda lowers it but still annoying
@@hhiram No, I sold it.
@@hhiram it's just EMI (electromagnetic interference) , more gpu/cpu load = more electric current = more EMI = more audio noise, your best bet to reduce it is to buy separate DAC and AMP, or you could buy a motherboard with separate audio circuitry.
@@rachmatzulfiqar Thanks! yeah i was able to fix it... most of the buzzing came through my audio interface while playing games but if i use the aux from the pc itself there is no more buzzing.
I had a wall-wart from China that had some annoying coil whine...so I slapped a magnet on it. It was fun tuning the harmonics of the coil whine with the magnet, until I found the sweet spot to dial down the noise completely.
Hey man, love your videos, your technical knowledge of computer components and the theory behind electronics is far beyond anyone else in the computer tech field here on UA-cam. Would love a video on minimising EMI/EMF by knowing what to pick and what to avoid when it comes to motherboards, PSU's, CPU overclocks/frequencies/settings to avoid, how the frequencies of graphics cards, CPU's and RAM can create more EMI/EMF, cross-talk between components picked up by the on-board audio interface, DIY shielding and things like that, I'm sure it'd go down well with audio/visual professionals as well as health conscious computer users, and could get a lot of views from those niche groupst.
Cheers!
That is a really good idea Sir, take an upvote.
Health? You have a cell phone, right? WiFi?
@@Michael-OBrien I don't use WIFI, and my phones are off 90% of the day.
A metal case, without a window, is a good Faraday cage if your computer is correctly grounded. But you know computers doesn't emit a lot and they are quite resilient to EMI, even in open cases. There are noms for that, IIRC Australian ones are the most constraining for EMI.
But if you care about that, what you should beware is the shielding of your domestic electricity cables especially if you use Homeplug PLC.
@@PainterVierax My main system is in a fully enclosed steel case, although it does have small ventilation holes at the top. The PC emits quite a large amount of EMI, measurable both with a low frequency meter, and also picked up by musical instruments pickups. I've got it plugged into a power condition which has a torodial copper transformer to clean up "dirty electricity" noise but it's still not perfect.
I'm thinking of getting a Fractal R2 XL case for my next build since it is heavy with thick steel walls, and perhaps even adding additional copper or aluminium mesh screen to the inside of the case.
You know, if I didn't have the hands on experience with coils I couldn't talk about it and be taken seriously, but I've actually built my own hand wound coils for different projects without using any glue or whatever, I just wound my coils very neat and very tight as possible doing it by hand but I never had any of my coils producing any noticeable sound at any frequency up to about 4 or 5 MHz...
Crazy right?
Some of the coils I made are just a little bit bigger than what you used to show in your video, the biggest coil I made is loosely wound on an old flyback that I'm playing with at the moment, I know it's not comparable with graphics card coils at all but it's a coil, also I made my own inductor which goes in between the flyback and the power supplies and that one does have a specific function in my case and I found out it needed to be wound in a specific way to get it to perform as good as it does now without making any noise or getting warm, however I still didn't have to use any resin, glue or whatever to hold the windings together...
Believe me I'm pushing a lot of amps through the inductor and the flyback coil, the output of my ZVS driver and flyback is about 100kV to 150kV and the plasma arc is white hot, about 10mm thick, I can pull about 100mm to 150mm white hot plasma arcs with my ZVS driver it's really crazy and very dangerous but I just find it fascinating to look at how it reacts with different stuff, blowing up stuff, even making beautiful figures in wood called lichtenberg figures with it... it's a lot of fun if you know what you're doing.
Not really related to this video but I always think about my high voltage projects automatically whenever I see or hear something or someone talking about coils and I get excited so I just wanted to share that, LOL.
Best regards.
You're comparing your homemade hobby amateur winds to a highly sophisticated machine built electrical component LOL.
@@jayryan7473 Nothing wrong in comparing. Hand wound coils can be superior.
Thank you Buildzoid!
Realy interessting topic
Finally someone talking about coil whine where it actually happens. People keep saying that coil whine are the sounds of fan spinning but is the inductor coil vibrating at a frequency that sounds like a whine.
Well in fact, fans can be noisy too because of their circuitry. A fan with crappy PWM filtering will give a square signal to the motor and it will produce noise. For strict DC fans, it can also be eared with cheap rheobuses which use bad PWM signal or have bad filtering instead of a proper linear voltage stepdown converter.
i have never seen anyone saying 'coil whine' has anything to do with fans (though they do have coils), must be younger people on youtube or reddit
watercooled people very often mention coil whine, instantly disproving fans
Some..."people" are also saying to put on headphones to not hear the coil whine. You know, the three wise monkeys "solution" to problems.
Thanks, I have some big coil whine on an UPS and now you gave me the idea of hot gluing the coils...
I love learning about things I've wondered about before but never actually invesitgated. Thank :)
yeah, I had mixed feelings about hot gluing the Vcore inductors on the M5A97 (Rev 1.0). the thing sounds like a flock of random angry birds when the FX8350 is idle or the system is in the bios. And it is loud enough to be audible from the other end of the house. I put a dab of hot glue on the base of the inductors and it didn't change anything, I ended up just stuffing deep-cone anechoic chamber sound absorber foam in the case above the VRM to keep the noise from being reflected out of the case. It reduced the noise to the point it was no longer audible from the other end of the house, it did not eliminate the noise tho.
Great vid BZ. B)
Would love to see someone make a video on testing coil whine mitigations. Maybe der8auer will try making a passively cooled htpc.
I'm toying with some ideas on testing some. It's just not really a priority for me.
@@ActuallyHardcoreOverclocking Coil whine is a huge problem on some of the ultra-thin laptops (Dell XPS etal). Trying some mitigation on those laptops, such as high-temp silicone on the inductors, would be an interesting branch out. I haven't seen anyone trying a "hardware" solution in the laptop space.
@@ActuallyHardcoreOverclocking my RTX 2070 super gigabyte variant has coil whine, would be nice to know how to fix that or lessen it
please make one, it would be super interesting to watch@@ActuallyHardcoreOverclocking
You're like Mr. Wizard for us tech nerds. Everytime I watch one of your ramblings I feel like I walk away with something that is useful (to me) .. whether it's useful or not in practicality that's not certain, but definitely appeals to my 'inner hacker' .. where I just like to know how it actually works.
Finally a good video on coilwhine, should send this to manufacturers and let them see it for 20 times.
The revised instructions for my EK block for my 2080ti FE included adding pads to the coils. After I had added those pads all coil whine did disappear.
That was very instructive. Thank you.
Im listening to this video while my coil whine is going in my mobo. Thanks teacher Buildzoid
This was just what I was thinking as I have the first card since the 90s that has wine. Was thinking hot glue. Thanks, Builzoid!
Xplained in Paint ❌
Xplained in GIMP ❌
Xplained in Sharpie ✔️
thx this is the best video about this topic, still after years 👍
also had a 980 with miss-applied Liquid metal. Clean the socket with a brush under almost cooking water. No joke. If you clean all the shortening-stuff away, it will probably run again. Mine did.
ya i got conductive thermal paste on my rx 580 8gb transisters and the card died but i cleaned it away re flashed bios and it works fine again.
You were looking for the term "ferromagnetic".
My XFX 7970 used to audibly whine in high fps menus but it was never audible while gaming. I have a Asus 1060 now and it doesn't whine at all so it sounds like you were right about them using moulded inductors.
Awesome, now when some one complains on reddit, I can just link them this! Thanks.
Considering it's NOT coming from the inductor(s) :P it's (coming) from the mosfet switching noise 16-20+kHz
I like to listen to you before going to sleep. Goodnight.
I had my first coil whine problem almost a year ago. It coincided that I bought a reference GTX 760 and a sound card together. I could hear a very strange whistle from the headphones while playing, which varied according to the load of the GPU. I went half crazy until I found out what that was. In my case I solved it by changing to a quality PSU.
What psu kind are you buying??
@@younesman1326 The problem was with a Corsair VS 550. I changed it for a CX 550 and everything was fine.
I have one of the Powercolor R9 290x's and it doesn't whine at all really. It's been a great card too, runs pretty cool, then again anything runs cooler than the reference 290x.
Opening the transmog tab in WoW made my old Sapphire card sound like a police car driving down the street and made my gpu core temp shoot up . I have a 1070 Strix now and it's completely silent when opening the same tab
Wow, thank you so much for the info! Really apreciate it!
Only time I ever had a "Coil Whine" was with an under performing power supply. Was using a 600 watt ThermalTake and went with a 750 watt and problem solved!
Then it was you PSU making the noise and not the card...
My Asus dual 2080 ti on ek block screams. Tried bran new 850 and 1200 watt psu, didn't matter. They say LR22 on them. I measure GPU core voltage and the whining correlates with it, higher voltage louder whine
Probably should have found this video before buying a new psu. Haha. Thankfully i wanted a psu.. but at least for the last few months i could have kept my stuff overclocked as i down clocked everything thinking my psu was gonna blow . 🤣
Thank you for the info. Vids like this help me understand my pc and usually stop me freaking out that stuff isnt actually being damaged or anything.
Problem is the glue only helps with low frequencies not high in kHz. I have electronics that are just a ATTiny13 with resistor, cap, and it will still whine in some use cases while in others it's silent and that's when using 18kHz+ PWM on it, yeah even then have one case that still audibly whines. As long as there is any switching, PWM and decent power/current being used, it can whine in some situation, doesn't need inductors to do it but those can indeed be a prime source on PC components.
I had a Zotac gtx 470 that had terrible coil whine, but only when the application or game ran at very high refreshrates.
I got a Powercolor Red Devil RX480 which produced a higher pitched coil whined at around 200 fps. I returned the card for the ASUS Strix RX 480. It too whined at very high FPS but at a lower frequency. However, as time went on they stopped and ran quietly.
My new 2070 super has it . My fix has been investing in a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.
This mf accidently sketched a Klan meeting. Lol
i got a fury x on launch and the coil whine was so bad i returned it and got a 980ti, happy ever since
Great informative video, thanks for your time.
So the mediocre PSU with high enough ripple is likely to cause more audible coil whine on GPU input filtering inductor?
When I saw the tumbnail I thought he was gonna implant a microchip in his palm
I love your videos Buildzoid! These "Ramblings" videos are always the most informative and seem to almost always teach me something new - Like your semi-recent video about RAM and how to mathmatically calculate real world speeds using frequency and timings!
Strange question however - Do you still that Gigabyte board and AMD FX 8 Core CPU from that overclocking video you did awhile back? I'm actually rather curious to see how the FX 8 Core series fairs (realistically say if your monitor only supports say 1920x1200@60hz) with something like a 1080ti - Just how usable is it in 2019? And more importantly how does it fair when the user disables 4 cores - How much more general gaming/work can be done vs having all 8 Cores running?
Some test on hot glues over time can become inductive so use silastic aka neutral silicone
I love learning on your channel. Is there a basic electronics and circuitry UA-cam channel you recommend?
EEVBlog, Afrotechmods, bigclivedotcom etc
allaboutcircuits.com is also a good resource as is electronics tutorials.
GreatScott, Marco Reps and CNHLohr
Ferrous is the word you were looking for.
I had coil whine rear its ugly head in the most ungodly loud way on my fury x the other day, whilst playing X4 Foundations. Had to lower settings, limit frame rate to 30 and crank fan speeds up to keep it under control.
my Gtx 1070 has horrible coil while. I tried to fix it with glue but did not help at all. Thought more glue could fix it. Wroooong. Now I have a horrid looking PCB but at least it still works. (did it 1 year ago)
Did you hot glue the inductors only or did you hot glue them to the PCB?
@@dosgos i covered the whole inductors from the pcb to the top
marmoto liferider what psu do you have?
@@fioletoviymewok9665 corsair 750 watt.
@buildzoid thank you for this very informative video!
There are still two questions i would like to ask you:
1.: There are stories about the internet that some cards become less whiny after some time of usage. Is there any explanation for this? All i can imagine after your video is cards that get louder, not the other way around.
2.: How exactly does the power supply have impact on the coil whine? This in fact i experienced myself, using two different power supplies can obiously change coil whine noticeably.
Maybe you can further explain things like this in future videos, it's very interesting :)
The more you use headphones/ear buds at high volumn, coil whine will become less
Finally this topic is touched by experts
The few Asus Strix 1080Ti's I've had all had the exact same coil whine. I tracked it down to the input filter inductors which are of the molded style.
I mitigated it by smothering them in nail polish and filling the area around them with cotton fill when installing the EKWB. It still whines but much reduced to the point I can't hear it while gaming.
Wouldn't it be a bad idea to put high temperature silicone on any of them? That would just make them heat up even more...
Every msi card I've owned had coil whine 980, 980ti 390x etc
Very interesting video, was wondering how it was caused although ive never experienced it, many thanks, good to know.
The important part you don't really explain explicitly is that anything solid is liable to crack, the key is having the coil in a flexible medium so that it can vibrate without cracking and separating from the housing.
My sapphire Nitro+ OC 480 has massive coil whine, and it drives me crazy somethings. But I love the card.
WOW, advancement in technology... paper!
I wonder, what job / degree Buildzoid has. He probably got straight A+ in Physics.
O+ in overclocking
i've got a coil whine problem with my build, for a long time.
4670k + 1060 (both OCed) + old (shitty) psu (460w total, 360w for 12V line). coil whine was only gpu related - i've heard it in furmark, all the times, and sometimes - in games.
since i changed PSU - no problem at all. no coil whine. 12v ripple, as i understand?
I can't recall any of the GPUs back in the 90's producing coil-whine.
Martin thats because they played DOOM on MSDOS at 24 fps and 600x800 resolution...
Weird. I had a 290x since it was released and it never had coil whine, while my GTX 960 whines like a screeching wet cat when loading.
I have an old Sapphire HD4890 it doesn't have coil whine it has coil 'rattle'
Interestingly the coil whine is in sync with framerate and at low FPS under high load it makes sounds like a rattlesnake.
Apparently it was normal on the Sapphire Vapor-X HD4890 2GB.
Still bizarre
I have read that "Neutral Cure Silicone" seems to be less corrosive than "normal" silicone or hot glue. Some claim the neutral cure silicone provides better vibration control and decent adhesion. I have a ton of electronics with PCB damage from mystery hot glue that deteriorated and/or became conductive. Any recommendations for mitigating coil whine?
Undervolt and FPS cap in MSI Afterburner may work
Who else is now looking at all Graphics Card PCB Analysis videos to see which cards have 'whiny' inductors?
I wonder if you can't just mold the inductors in silicone?
Assembly-line needs some hard surface to hold the thing, silicone is far too soft for that.
Well one of the properties of the potting compounds they use for encasing the inductors within that ferrite housing, is that the resin they use has a higher thermal conductivity. SO that the coils, however little heat they are producing, are not wrapped in an insulator. Whereby the temperature of the coil has nowhere to go, and keeps on rising until eventually burning out / failing. So maybe if silicone is too thermally insulative, then it cannot be used for the potting compound. I'm not sure of the other reason(s).
Hopefully in the future, at least one manufacturer will put the work in to economically engineer and produce better chokes. Which would help to go a long way towards mitigating this common issue.
Anyhow thank you Buildzoid for this video. It has been really helpful / informative. As I understand it was not something that affects you very much.
unless someone invented silicone that's more insulating than air..
You can make in silicon inductances and capacitance, those parts just tend to not be very space efficient. Look at the space taken by the external inductors and image adding multiple of that to the GPU die. Doesnt really work
So for a rtx 2080strix whats the solution? Rtv silicone where? Thermal pad? I'm not so good in english thanks for all Will help
I'm hearing people complaining about Z390 Aorus Master coil whine. Is the verdict ready, which ones have better or quieter vrm, Master or the cheaper Gigabyte boards like Ultra or Pro? Also is the Asus Hero XI as bad as initially thought? I have a 9900k sitting on a table, long waiting for Gigabyte boards but Hero boards on stock right now.
You can probably get a z370 super high end board for the same as a high end z390... that's what I want to do
Is it possible that the electric system where I live is causing my GPU to coil whine ? I just built a new PC and every single GPU i put in it coil whines. 1080 MSI GamingX and two RX 580 Nitro+ 8gb cards(not crossfire), all brand new, all of them coil whined. The AMD cards coil whined a lot less than the nVidia, but still pretty surprising that they did. This is the rest of the system:
Seasonic Focus+ 550W Gold+
R5 2600
Corsair 2x8gb LPX DDR4 3000Mhz
AsRock B450 Gaming K4
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB
The PSU doesn't coil whine, its always the GPU. Help please.
He just told you that the inductors on the video cards are the ones vibrating. You should had just returned those faulty products and ask for your money back. This is what we should ALL do, so to tell the manufacturers we won't accept these kind of practices and lack of quality.
I had a crappy PSU about 10 years ago that caused my GPU to whine quite a bit. High quality PSUs fix a lot of issues. Never skimp out on your PSU.
Hey, any chance of you addressing this in future GPU and motherboard reviews?
no because it's hard to predict.
+@@ActuallyHardcoreOverclocking Pity, but thanks for the answer =)
put a mic next to the different types during load, might be interesting to hear up close
This is genuinely helpful
This channel is fuckin rad. Keep it up.
Very good job on the manicure bro.
Just wondering wouldn't the coil whine also impact the psu as it should have the same load variance supplying the gpu?
Or are the inductors used there generally not susceptible to coil whine?
this dude knows alot about tech
In any test i've seen the noise actually is coming from the capacitors.
My BFG 9800 GT Eco had horrendous coil whine under Any load, and I recently discovered my AMD Frontier Edition has coil whine under max load. Shame....
Almost tempted to drill a hole in them and full the coil with non conductive glue.
My damned Cooler Master V700 started to whine a few months ago. It is 5+ years old at this point, but the only coils in it are the big ass type wound around a metal ring...
In the past year or so every damn component that i had, has produced a whine to varying degrees. A GTX 980Ti, ASUS MAximus VI Hero, EVGAGTX 580 DS OC, GTX 570, ASUS HD 7970 DC OC and now a MSI GTX1080 and my PSU.
So damn annoying and i am very sensitive to it. Forget the components, why did the PSU start whining ?
you are the best, thank you
0:29 must be nice to be able to ignore coilwine
Yeah i'm going to Hotglue my 2 1070ti strix-.-
Both my 290X and Vega 64 have minor amounts of whine. Generally it happens in menus and things where the GPU is doing 500-1000 FPS. But with most gaming scenarios there is little to no whine. Radeon Chill should eliminate most if not all of it.
my Sapphire r9 390 whines pretty good at super high framerates - like uncapped loading screens where fps goes up to ~1000 fps
Unfortunately, you left out the most important coil whine sources, where it is the most annoying: Laptops. And because laptops are so flat, I guess there is a bunch of coils used which also are small and tend to coil whine more, than these cube sized ones, which arent found in laptops I think. So please make another video on laptop coil too and how to fix it. I actually found, that if you put some kind of thermal pad on/around the coils, it reduces the whine too mostly by sound wave absorption. It also looks to me, coil whine in laptops is totally different to explain because they mostly happen in idle situations and not under load situations. My Dell XPS 15 9570, for example, has a bunch of coil whine under specific situations. One is periodic for example happening every 2 seconds for a short time. Then there are lots of "crackling" sounds while loading a web page. Then there is a "mice like" noise when I do boot up or if I open a specific setting window under Windows (the boot timeout and kernel memory dump window, have no idea why it produces a coil whine but it does).
i have never heard coil whine from a laptop, only mechanical drive heads rattling & interference to the headphone audio at max volume
@@kn00tcn ... coil whine is THE most annoying thing on laptops. Especially on Dell XPS line since years. It mostly just happens with high-end laptops because of the larger current flow (45W CPU and then 75W GPU or even more), so if you have a potato laptop you obviously never heard about it. Also a lot of newer NVMe SSDs tend to coil whine.
@@bestonyoutube i have a gaming one with 45w i7 something w gtx, 180w power brick
but how can i hear coil whine if the fan is making a sound? i do hear the hard drive when listening closely
have you heard it outside of dell? not that i dont trust you, i just like statistics & measurements, might even start asking others for mic recordings
(edit: i intentionally didnt list exact cpu/gpu, but i'm very familiar with tower pc hw over the past decade, just dont interact with many laptops other than normie ones or my highish end for its time one, have clearly heard various noises from multiple desktop gpus due to the quiet 120 & up fans)
@@kn00tcn Lol... it is all about when the fans are OFF/low obviously. ua-cam.com/video/blyswNKEPEY/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/NGPBzzxDFfE/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/LLV4tQ-6iiE/v-deo.html (just google yourself...)
@@bestonyoutube so far dell sucks, need to see other brands (you dont have to search for me now)
the second video was near the monitor, that might be the backlight hum, my 2008 CCFL monitor has a hum that changes in tone or intensity (not necessarily pitch) when i change brightness, though that might have appeared in the last few years of old age
My RX570 whined hard with a Corsair CX PSU. Changed to Seasonic and whine is gone.