Crappy whining capacitors

[cytg111]

So, apparantly i'm "blessed" with this hearing that catches high pitched noises, i've always been sensitive to ie. CRTs whining all over the place.

Within the last 10 years, either I am one unlucky customer or electronics is hitting an all time low.
List of recent hardware that screams at me
- Asrock extreme v4 z87 (my new haswell rig, severely dissapointed with this one).
- Old Q9450 rig (pwr supply suspected, was replaced before properly invest.)
- Multi purpose power supply.
- HP Laptop (5 years old)
- Asus 20" LCD screen
- Multiple screens at work.

So on and so on.

So, I am reaching out here, I cannot be the only one? It is getting worse, is it not?

 

[boomerang]

Do you find yourself chasing cars?

 

[XavierMace]

Have you considered using headphones at unsafe volume levels to alleviate this problem?

 

[redzo]

Have you considered using headphones at unsafe volume levels to alleviate this problem?

Were you being sarcastic?
Otherwise, my liver(alcohol) and my lungs(smoking) are going to nuke you out of orbit. His hearing will probably follow.

It used to annoy the crap out off me and it still does. PSUs, MBs, GPUs, LCDs(more so after heavy use) whine. Yes, it is possible to end up with a zero noise config, but the problem with consumers like us is that luck is the only metric of purchase. It is a lottery.

Yes, it is real. Yes, a lot of people are being affected by it. I imagine that selling products as "coil whine free" is very easy for marketeers, but probably the cost of designing/testing/cherry picking electrical parts to warrant this does not make it out to profit land.
There are probably not enough signs from consumers so that manufacturers are willing to risk it and target this market segment.

 

[Madpacket]

Coil whine is getting worse. Power supplies, video cards (especially video cards), motherboards, CPU's, even laptops and LCD screens all emit coil whine. People will tell you to ignore it, it's normal. Or you're too sensitive, just drown out the noise with something else.

I hear all sorts of stupid crap like "Oh, just change your cheap power supply then" when you've spent over $200 on a platinum brand name unit or things like "there's no coil whine because my sample size of one works fine so you must be wrong".

Anyways, just search Newegg for any electrical component that's sold at least 50-100 units and do a search for coil whine, you'll see this is a widespread issue that somehow we as consumers let it become acceptable.

 

[UsandThem]

Luckily my PC is coil whine free.

However, my Nighthawk router has a whine like no other. When it starts getting a lot of traffic on it, it is almost unbearable to around it when it starts screaming. It works great, but that high-pitched whine is something else.

 

[cytg111]

Do you find yourself chasing cars?

I do, its my fetish, how did you know?

Were you being sarcastic?
Otherwise, my liver(alcohol) and my lungs(smoking) are going to nuke you out of orbit. His hearing will probably follow.

It used to annoy the crap out off me and it still does. PSUs, MBs, GPUs, LCDs(more so after heavy use) whine. Yes, it is possible to end up with a zero noise config, but the problem with consumers like us is that luck is the only metric of purchase. It is a lottery.

Yes, it is real. Yes, a lot of people are being affected by it. I imagine that selling products as "coil whine free" is very easy for marketeers, but probably the cost of designing/testing/cherry picking electrical parts to warrant this does not make it out to profit land.
There are probably not enough signs from consumers so that manufacturers are willing to risk it and target this market segment.

Found this
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/psu-recommendation-no-coil-whine.199820/ , apparantly a PSU designed NOT to whine..

If I had to guesstimate it i'd say its 1 in 20 that can actually hear it, and thus get annoyed by it. Ah ignorant bliss :/ .. I wouldnt be surprised if we were prone to something like tinitus as well (kind of cant loose what ya aint got).

Coil whine is getting worse. Power supplies, video cards (especially video cards), motherboards, CPU's, even laptops and LCD screens all emit coil whine. People will tell you to ignore it, it's normal. Or you're too sensitive, just drown out the noise with something else.

I hear all sorts of stupid crap like "Oh, just change your cheap power supply then" when you've spent over $200 on a platinum brand name unit or things like "there's no coil whine because my sample size of one works fine so you must be wrong".

Anyways, just search Newegg for any electrical component that's sold at least 50-100 units and do a search for coil whine, you'll see this is a widespread issue that somehow we as consumers let it become acceptable.

- Thank you .. it IS getting worse. Not just me.. well at some point we'll get critical mass and they'll do something about it!

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

I had a couple nvidia cards with coil while. clear nail polish glopped liberally around the coils reduced it by 80 percent or so. not a recommended fix but those cards ran for years at F@H like that

 

[Mr Evil]

Modern electronics have more switching circuits instead of linear circuits. This is great for efficiency, but if the switching frequency is <20kHz then it can be quite unpleasant.

 

[Oyeve]

I too have over strong hearing. At my office and at night at home, I always have a fan running. Need the white noise to block out electronics.

 

[Morbus]

I've had coil whine before, when I didn't know what it was. I found that often, kicking the equipment helps for a little bit. Titling it also works sometimes. But usually I take it as a piece of hardware that needs to GO and die in a fire.

Being poor means that only happens when it actually fails.

Of course I was brought up in a time when CRTs where all the rage, and those whined like I don't know what. Seriously, it was unbelievable.

Fortunately for me, my computer is pretty silent now. I feel for you, OP.

 

[bononos]

......
So on and so on.

So, I am reaching out here, I cannot be the only one? It is getting worse, is it not?

Like the previous poster said, its getting worse for you now because of switching mode power supplies and components have been standard for some time. And maybe because theres are more electronic devices all around us.

 

[mikeymikec]

Odd. I only have two bits of equipment that emit coil whine: My monitor (only in standby mode) and the charger/receiver unit for my wireless mouse (which if I unplug it from the mains, it stops the whine while the receiver gets its power from USB).

Otherwise out of the multitude of computers I've built through my line of work, the only whine I've ever encountered was fan whine.