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Question After 20 years, I finally got a GPU with HORRIBLE coil whine

UsandThem

UsandThem

Elite Member
I had been Folding with it about 9 months (in a Folding-only PC), and I started noticing a minor noise a few months back. At first I thought one of the fans was developing a bad bearing or something, as the noise was intermittent and not too loud. It's this card right here: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814932029

The other day I pulled my 1080ti out of my main PC to get ready to sell, and put the Gigabyte 1070ti in my main PC. The noise was horrible and really loud, so I figured it had to be a bad bearing. So I pull the card out, inspect its fans, and they all are good. I reinstall it and leave the side panel off of my case, and holy moly is some annoying, loud coil whine. I've seen people talking about coil whine over the years on here, and I do not see how someone could stand that in their main PC (unless they wear closed-back headphones when gaming).

I reckon I should RMA it, but after reading all the Gigabyte RMA horror stories lately, I'm afraid I'll just waste money sending it back to them to claim "item has physical damage, warranty void". Even though this card is in pristine condition, and definitely does not have any damage. I guess I could always put it back in the Folding-only PC since that PC is in a room by itself. I just have not had very good luck with Gigabyte lately after so many years of very good luck with their products. Decisions, decisions.........
 
That's too bad. I would RMA it, but take pictures first, for proof.

But why are you selling the 1080Ti?
 
Shmee said:
That's too bad. I would RMA it, but take pictures first, for proof.

But why are you selling the 1080Ti?
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Downsizing the fleet a bit as I have too many GPUs, and I don't game enough anymore to justify having a 1080ti in my main PC. The 1070ti would have worked great (minus the coil whine). I still have 3 other PCs that I do Folding on, so that's plenty for me.

I might end up RMAing it, and cross my fingers that they take care of it. I can't remember who it was at the moment, but there was another mod on here who had a really bad Gigabyte RMA experience in the past.
 
my fist card with horrible coil whine was an EVGA FX5900SE in 2004, that thing was so bad that just scrolling a web page would cause it to whine... the funny thing is that I got rid of that pretty quick (sold it cheaply to a guy from a forum that saw me complaining about it...) and bought another of the exact same model last year for nostalgia, and the new one is perfectly silent.

anyway, I would totally consider it a defect for a card to produce annoying noises that it shouldn't, so yeah...

fo a while my test for whine was launching crysis or something without vsync, those videos running at 1000+ FPS would produce the loud noises, while just high loads at lower framerate was not as effective.

but I think my current cards all have a little bit of it under extreme cases like the one I mentioned (1000+FPS), but overall they are fine for normal use.
 
My experience with several Gigabyte GPU RMAs has all been horrible. That said, I'd warranty the card, but make sure you take pics and mark it so they don't just send you back the same GPU (which they did several times with one of the cards I RMA'd). I'd also thoroughly test the card that they send back. They have sent me several legitimately bad cards that couldn't pass 30 minutes on Heaven, let alone a real stress test like BFV.
 
This sounds silly, but do you have any other PSUs you can try? Or swap to different PCIe power connectors?

My son's previous GPU had coil whine, stuffed it into an Antec Sonata classic case with some dynamat in there, and it pretty well wasn't noticeable down under the desk. Come to later find out that upgrading his PSU to a new 650W Corsair turned it silent. Think the original PSU was my very old circa 2006 Antec 500. Thing still works lol, but these days it's sitting in my SETI/faff about box.
 
Arkaign said:
This sounds silly, but do you have any other PSUs you can try? Or swap to different PCIe power connectors?

My son's previous GPU had coil whine, stuffed it into an Antec Sonata classic case with some dynamat in there, and it pretty well wasn't noticeable down under the desk. Come to later find out that upgrading his PSU to a new 650W Corsair turned it silent. Think the original PSU was my very old circa 2006 Antec 500. Thing still works lol, but these days it's sitting in my SETI/faff about box.
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Of course I have extra power supplies! What kind of computer enthusiast doesn't keep a million spare components (and every miscellaneous screw and connector) from builds from 10 - 15 years ago? 😛

When it was in my Folding PC, I had it on a EVGA G3, and when I moved it to my main PC, it was on a Seasonic Prime. I think I just got a dud GPU. Unfortunately, when I bought the card it was during the peak of the mining craze, so cards would go out of stock as soon as they were listed. There were no reviews (from sites or from users), so I gambled when I bought it not knowing the build quality, etc. Turns out after reviews were published, Gigabyte went a different direction from most other GPU companies who used GTX 1080 boards for their 1070ti GPU, and instead used a custom PCB (that just wasn't that great).

Sometimes you roll the dice, and you get snake eyes......like I did this time. 🙁
 
Good mother of god does Gigabyte suck the big one. It gives me chills to think about how close I got to came a new 2070 giga before settling on a used 1080 ti ftw3 for the same price at the last minute. Now when I loon at all the piles of reviews for that card, it's horrifying! I can only echo the sentiment of everyone else here and insist you take pictures from multiple angles before attempting to RMA.
 
Markfw said:
Thats probably why I have been married and divirced twice. I never listened to what she said if it was important to me. And she slept on the couch, not me.
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You have more balls than me! if i told my girlfriend to sleep on the couch id probably be making a trip to the emergency room.......

That said if i had to sleep on the couch with the cats life wouldn't be so bad if i had my pc hardware i wanted lol.
 
My girlfriend would have zero say in how I use my money. Wife would be a different story. Though, the one who I would marry should already know that I like to upgrade my hardware from time to time... So that shouldn't be an issue.

But about coil whine... I had Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition that had absolutely infernal coil whine. On top of that the cooling was really poor and noisy.

 
Sonikku said:
Good mother of god does Gigabyte suck the big one. It gives me chills to think about how close I got to came a new 2070 giga before settling on a used 1080 ti ftw3 for the same price at the last minute. Now when I loon at all the piles of reviews for that card, it's horrifying! I can only echo the sentiment of everyone else here and insist you take pictures from multiple angles before attempting to RMA.
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Yup. I wouldn't touch another gigabyte GPU with a ten foot pole. I just had such a horrible experience with every gigabyte GPU I had to warranty. EVGA has always been smooth and the failure rates I've seen with their cards have been significantly lower.
 
Tup3x said:
But about coil whine... I had Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition that had absolutely infernal coil whine. On top of that the cooling was really poor and noisy.
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I've never heard CW that bad before. I think one of my old 7970 cards had audible CW but not like that.
 
EXCellR8 said:
I've never heard CW that bad before. I think one of my old 7970 cards had audible CW but not like that.
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Mine's not quite that bad.....yet. But it seems to get worse as time goes on, and I'm confident it will get to that point sooner or later.

I used to do Folding on my PC while I worked on other stuff on my PC, but now if I Fold, it's after I'm done using the PC. I can listen to music as long as I am using my fully closed-back pair of headphones and I can't hear it. But I can't wear my open-back pair of headphones at all without that noise getting in, and that's my favorite pair to wear when listening to the greatest band of all time.......Pink Floyd. 😀
 
Tup3x said:
My girlfriend would have zero say in how I use my money. Wife would be a different story. Though, the one who I would marry should already know that I like to upgrade my hardware from time to time... So that shouldn't be an issue.

But about coil whine... I had Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition that had absolutely infernal coil whine. On top of that the cooling was really poor and noisy.

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I had an XFX Fury card that sounded exactly like that. No way was I going to keep it. Thankfully I had bought it from Amazon so I just returned it and got a, MSI 390 instead that was rock solid.
 
Yea I guess headphones is a decent short-term solution. I've actually pretty sensitive hearing so I can certainly understand not wanting to keep a card that makes these wretched noises. I'm willing to bet if I took more thorough measures of creating noise-less systems that I would be more keen on picking up on this. There's no way I've been lucky enough to have any cards with zero audible whine.
 
EXCellR8 said:
Yea I guess headphones is a decent short-term solution. I've actually pretty sensitive hearing so I can certainly understand not wanting to keep a card that makes these wretched noises. I'm willing to bet if I took more thorough measures of creating noise-less systems that I would be more keen on picking up on this. There's no way I've been lucky enough to have any cards with zero audible whine.
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I think the noise would be that much worse if I didn't have it in my Be Quiet Dark Base 900 case. It's big, heavy, and has quite a bit of sound-deadening material in. It really kept me from hearing my EVGA GTX 1080ti FTW3 card pretty much at all, and it's not one of the quieter 1080ti cards that were made since it uses 3 smaller fans.
 
EXCellR8 said:
Yea I guess headphones is a decent short-term solution. I've actually pretty sensitive hearing so I can certainly understand not wanting to keep a card that makes these wretched noises. I'm willing to bet if I took more thorough measures of creating noise-less systems that I would be more keen on picking up on this. There's no way I've been lucky enough to have any cards with zero audible whine.
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I use open back headphones so no noise blocking at all (pretty much the same as without them). These days if I get a card that whines clearly more than it should, I'll send it back to shop. If coil whine is clearly audible over fan noise, it's clearly a defect.
 
Yea if it's louder than fan noise that's just straight up aggravating and unacceptable. I'm no electronics engineer or fabricator but I'm guessing that the quality of materials and the tightness of the wound coil is to blame for the actual sound? Are these components actually assembled at these partner companies or do they buy in bulk from a supplier who's already wound them? Beyond the scope of my knowledge... but if it's more option B I can see it as more of a crap shoot.
 
I may have had coil whine in the past, but it might not have been bad enough to hear it over the fans. Although, my current setup is 2x 360 radiators with the CPU and (single) GPU cooled. It sounds like a bit of overkill -- and arguably, it is -- but I do it so I can run the fans a bit lower and still get effective cooling at a low noise level. Well, what that meant is that my ASUS Strix 1080 Ti's coil whine was able to become quite noticeable. Although, I'm still not sure if it is coil whine as I've never actually heard it before. It sounds a lot more like a pump (sort of like a whirring noise), but it's only audible if I'm playing a game. If I have a windowed game, I can click out of the window, and the noise goes away, but if I click back into it, the noise comes back. (My pumps and fans are controlled via two separate Noctua manual PWM controllers, so there's nothing ramping pumps/fans up.)

Fortunately, I haven't heard a peep from my EVGA 2080 Ti, which I'm quite glad about.
 
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