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Coil whine investigation [HWC]

The two reference R9 290s that I've had had no coil whine under any circumstance (high frame rate undemanding graphical loads, high and steady compute loads, demanding graphical loads... etc, I've even gamed while mining)

I don't think any particular card is an outlier and in my opinion premium products that claim to have no/reduced chance of whine are peddled snake oil from rusemasters out for your buck. It's random and you win when it doesn't happen (I've been exceedingly lucky over the years).
 
Gloomy said:
The two reference R9 290s that I've had had no coil whine under any circumstance (high frame rate undemanding graphical loads, high and steady compute loads, demanding graphical loads... etc, I've even gamed while mining)
Click to expand...
And that's really my one concern with an otherwise excellent article. Coil whine's roots are at least in part design issues, but it's not a uniform problem; what happens will vary on a card-by-card basis even within the same batch. There are a multitude of factors that affect it, including power quality and minute variations in the construction of each inductor.

Consequently, drawing conclusions for an entire line of cards based on one sample (and on one PSU and one power grid) is really stretching it. This is the kind of phenomena where you really need to be testing a large number of samples in different conditions in order to put together a distribution of results. Unfortunately this isn't in the realm of possibility for most review sites.🙁
 
0/2 coil whine here 290x's. (reference cards)

Interestingly they claim every reference card (tiny sample size, but still) had coil whine.
 
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All cards I've had the past 5 years whine a bit with very high fps, some are louder than others.

I'm not too bothered with it, it's usually only during extreme fps loadscreens or something, could easily fix it with an fps limiter.
 
2x reference R290 in my main rig. No coil whine.

A lot more reference R290 in my mining rig, also no coil whine.

But I did had a reference 7970 and gtx670 with terrible coil whine.

If you wan't to be safe, buy GPUs from brands that specifically market their use of high end components to reduce occurrence of coil whine. Then if it happens, you can get a replacement.
 
The reference 290s I have exhibit coil whine (more like a click actually) at partial mining load. I noticed the cards were particularly noisy with unoptimized miners, but once I switched to optimized miners (with higher hash rates), the "clicking" was gone.
 
I've only had coil whine a long time ago from an XFX Radeon 6950 video card. Drove me nuts and ended up selling it.

Other than that i've never personally had a problem.

I do plan on getting either a GTX 960 or 970 card in the future and will only buy it from Amazon (Prime).

Need to make sure that if i do get one with coil whine that i can exchange it.

My ears are very sensitive to high pitched noises and it's like a dog whistle to me 🙁
 
The only card that i had coil whine with at any point was an Asus 670 DCUII and it only occurred when the screen was black. It was fine at any other load. I think it has more to do with the combination of components. a card that whines with one PSU might not necessarily whine with another.

After a while the 670 stopped whining all together.
 
Gloomy said:
The two reference R9 290s that I've had had no coil whine under any circumstance (high frame rate undemanding graphical loads, high and steady compute loads, demanding graphical loads... etc, I've even gamed while mining)

I don't think any particular card is an outlier and in my opinion premium products that claim to have no/reduced chance of whine are peddled snake oil from rusemasters out for your buck. It's random and you win when it doesn't happen (I've been exceedingly lucky over the years).
Click to expand...

It's HWC. They get the slowest, loudest, hottest AMD cards made as a rule. And if they aren't, they'll adjust their test procedures to change it.
 
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