If your 290x has coil whine

Adampa1006

Member
May 29, 2013
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I emailed XFX (the brand I got) about the issue. They replied that AMD has instructed the AIB partners to replace the card under warranty if the customer requests it with this issue. Sometimes manufacturers will not replace a card with coil whine because it's not considered defective, but for the 290x that appears to be not the case. Here's hoping my second one doesn't have it!!
 

RomanMtz

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2004
1,035
4
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Same thing happened to me with a Gigabyte 290 I bought... first one had pretty bad coil whine. RMA'd it to Newegg and second one was fine, no problems at all.
 

96Firebird

Diamond Member
Nov 8, 2010
5,709
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Glad they recognize it as a problem. I have been lucky enough to never personally experience coil whine, but I'm sure it would be a nuisance.
 

Skurge

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2009
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Glad they recognize it as a problem. I have been lucky enough to never personally experience coil whine, but I'm sure it would be a nuisance.

There was some coil whine on my old 6990, you could only hear it with the case open and with the accelero twin turbo installed. The GTX690 has the same type of coil whine. So in normal use, you would never hear it. So I'm sure it is pretty common, just not as bad enough to hear in normal situations.
 
Feb 19, 2009
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That's great news, now MSI can accept RMA based on coil whine. I really hated their policy of no coil-whine returns, its a gamble buying from them. Hopefully NV can do the same because this crap shouldn't be happening on expensive GPUs from any side.
 

Ferzerp

Diamond Member
Oct 12, 1999
6,438
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I've been lucky. The only equipment I ever had that did that was a laptop, and it only did it while scrolling web pages and no other time (and only certain pages).
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
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Is coil whine preventable by using a certain (maybe more expensive) component?

Yes, it is preventable, but it is an engineering issue. Wizzard at TPU mentioned this:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7990/31.html

...The whine is generated by resonating power circuitry coils and is a problem that can be resolved; it's just an engineering challenge. NVIDIA did so for the GTX 690 and GTX Titan; both cards don't have such coil whine issues. On the HD 7990, however, it is very apparent....
 
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thilanliyan

Lifer
Jun 21, 2005
11,848
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So is it specific to each card or is it something you can engineer once and then reuse for other cards?

If it's specific for each card, I can see AMD/nVidia not worrying too much about it for everything except the very high end cards.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
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Its good to see people can RMA it, even tho they are not legally obligated to do it. Coil whine can be terrible stressful to listen to.
 

PPB

Golden Member
Jul 5, 2013
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I have the funniest coil whine ever, only shows up in very specific scenarios (moving my mouse in AutoCAD is the more frequent one), but on gaming no problem at all. Its really intriguing what's behind it.
 
Sep 23, 2013
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Glad they recognize it as a problem. I have been lucky enough to never personally experience coil whine, but I'm sure it would be a nuisance.

i have it pretty bad on my gtx 770 palit :(
the annoying thing about it is that it changes frequency and volume all the time, so you can´t "forget that it´s there", like you can with a loud, but monotonous cooler fan. the brain can´t filter it out as it´s constantly changing with load
won´t return the card because of that though
 
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