How noisy is your EA500?

[v8envy]

So I've got a 2 week old EA500 in my case and I noticed quite a bit of capacitor-sounding whine coming from it under load. It's completely quiet when the PC is idle, but when stressed with 3d work from the GPU the PSU emits a whine the loudness and pitch of which matching how hard the GPU is working.

A different 350watt TruePower stays noiseless. I'm a bit leery of using it for anything other than testing though.

Is this normal? Should I be worried re: the EA500 blowing soon and taking the rest of my PC with it?

 

[Ponuppy]

My EA500 has been fine as far as 'whine' noises goes. But the most graphic intensive application I run is warcraft III at max settings so I may not be loading it enough. Hopefully others can chime in with their experiences.

On a separate note, typically capacitors do not make whine noises. Typically, whine noises are exhibited by inductors / transformers (read: magnetic components).

 

[v8envy]

Ponuppy, can you do me a giant favor and load up 'atitool' and run the stability test? If possible with a factory OCd 8800GT in the system. HL2 lost coast video stresstest is enough to cause this to happen, but you have to pay a lot more attention.

 

[Zap]

I'm currently (not for long though, just got a Corsair VX550) running an EA500 with a factory overclocked 8800GT, overclocked E6750 and two HDDs. No extraneous noise besides a tiny bit of fan noise. I'm switching to the Corsair and a passive 8800GT (ECS w/Accelero S1) just to knock off some more noise.

 

[v8envy]

Thanks Zap. I've fired up an email to antec tech support, but I wouldn't be surprised if this turns into an RMA. The whining is not overly disruptive, just nerve-wracking now that I know what to listen for.

It also only occurs during stressful 3d operation, like running atitool's stability test (need the GPU heat to test my optimizations to case airflow, games don't heat the GPU high enough to notice a difference).