RTX 2080 Ti Founder's Edition coil whine

[gdansk]

I received my 2080 Ti FE last week. It has bad coil whine. I tried with three different power supplies: EVGA P2 650, Corsair HX750i and Sea Sonic Prime Titanium 1000W. The noise persisted for all three. So I requested a replacement card from Nvidia. Today it arrived, and again, with all three power supplies the card whines. Two cards with whine seems really unusual, don't they test these things? But it's even worse I've had six different GPUs over the last year, four of which have had awful coil whine. The power supply didn't matter, those four GPUs always whined. Only the EVGA GTX 1080s have no or tolerable whine.

Summary: Besides different power supplies, what else can I test? Do I have to keep shipping these across the country until I get a magic card that doesn't whine like a banshee?

 

[alcoholbob]

Does it still whine even with vsync or an fps limiter?

 

[gdansk]

Does it still whine even with vsync or an fps limiter?

It seems to help for some games, but not for others.

 

[alcoholbob]

Why don't you do something about it yourself and apply some hot glue or some other dampening material on the coils of the offending unit?

There isn't much of an expectation for audiophile level silence on a gaming product. The only components I know of that have heavily dampened coils are home theater A/V receivers and high end televisions, both of which are items that are expected to be audible and visible every day in a living room, so they tend to be well dampened with heavy material or adhesive out of the factory, although this depends on the manufacturer.

The other issue is cost, GPUs basically operate on next to zero profit margin for the those actually involved in manufacturing and distribution. Sure, Nvidia gets 99.9% of the profit, but everybody else who actually builds the board and components doesn't get much of a cut, so costs will be cut on anything that isn't performance related. Gluing down or adding mass to coils isn't a high priority.

 

[gdansk]

I'm pretty sure Nvidia is making a healthy profit off these $1200 cards. I don't want to apply hot glue or anything else that would make warranty service more likely to be rejected. And finally, I have existing GPUs (two EVGA GTX 1080 SC) that have no perceptible coil whine. I know it is not impossible for them to come from the factory without making any noise.

 

[LTC8K6]

Hot glue is not likely to work on a modern card. The coils are not out in the open like they were back in the day.

That said, if I could ID the specific device on the board that is whining, I'd probably try some glue on it to see if it helped.

 

[krumme]

What is the reason for coil whine. Low freq noise on the ps or what?

 

[William Gaatjes]

What is the reason for coil whine. Low freq noise on the ps or what?

It depends on the smps design and the load. If for example the gpu core clock and core voltage throttles because of light load, and the power control circuitry inside the gpu updates for example every millisecond, so that the load current jumps up and down every millisecond, one could here that.
If it is not the power control circuitry, it is usually the smps itself that starts to perform pulse skipping or enters burst mode which is similar when the load current is low. This pulse skipping or burst mode causes the smps to still switch in the hundreds of kilohertz (or a few megahertz) range but it does so in bursts, sometimes in the audio range we can here. These bursts can happen depending on the desigh a few thousand times per second. Which would be audible.

The main reason for audible noise are either the mechanical vibrations of the copper windings of the inductors (magnetorestriction) or the piezo electric effect of ceramic capacitors.
Most high current, high performance but more expensive inductors are flat wire windings that are fully sealed and fully surrounded(molded) with ferrite core material. There are no airgaps. And so less likely to be noticably audible.
These are not assembled but molded. But these are also more expensive to manufacturer and less likely to be used for low margin products.

 

[Omegaboost]

Has anyone experience coil whine on aftermarket PCB designs?

 

[Braxos]

Get the resolution down to get higher fps on a game 400 -500 it helped on my card. The coil whine did go away with that trick. It was a 980 ti strix.

 

[krumme]

It depends on the smps design and the load. If for example the gpu core clock and core voltage throttles because of light load, and the power control circuitry inside the gpu updates for example every millisecond, so that the load current jumps up and down every millisecond, one could here that.
If it is not the power control circuitry, it is usually the smps itself that starts to perform pulse skipping or enters burst mode which is similar when the load current is low. This pulse skipping or burst mode causes the smps to still switch in the hundreds of kilohertz (or a few megahertz) range but it does so in bursts, sometimes in the audio range we can here. These bursts can happen depending on the desigh a few thousand times per second. Which would be audible.

The main reason for audible noise are either the mechanical vibrations of the copper windings of the inductors (magnetorestriction) or the piezo electric effect of ceramic capacitors.
Most high current, high performance but more expensive inductors are flat wire windings that are fully sealed and fully surrounded(molded) with ferrite core material. There are no airgaps. And so less likely to be noticably audible.
These are not assembled but molded. But these are also more expensive to manufacturer and less likely to be used for low margin products.

Wow. Thanx