Whine during mouse movement?

[destrekor]

I feel this is a new thing, it seems like something that would have jumped out at me before.

[note: I had some recent trouble with my system, but everything should be good to go now.]

Whenever I move around the mouse by itself, I hear noise that reminds me of coil whine.

Nothing changed with the mouse drivers or settings, such as the 1000Hz polling or anything. I've tried setting it down to 500Hz, it seemed to get quieter, and for sure at 125Hz I didn't hear it. However, that's not the correct solution IMHO.
It is a Logitech G502. One thing of note, there was a recent firmware update. Could it be something as simple as that? Anything else I can check or try to make this go away?

 

[mfenn]

Where do you hear the whine coming from? The mouse itself? Something inside the PC?

 

[destrekor]

Where do you hear the whine coming from? The mouse itself? Something inside the PC?

Sorry, probably should have included that piece of info!

It is from inside the PC. I can't tell if it's from the GPU or from the CPU area.

Additional phase lights on the 290X Lightning do indicate more activity whenever I move the mouse. 8 phases are always on, 4 additional ones have activity indicating by a strobe effect, and they are more engaged during mouse movement; I cannot say this occurred before, I never paid attention to that level of detail, I just noticed it when messing with the mouse and listening for location of the noise.

 

[destrekor]

Well, I've done far too many things in order to fix this.

I don't know if I just never heard it before, or if my recent system screwups and recovery induced it, but I cannot get rid of it.

I've done the following:

Installed latest version of Inte's Management Engine Interface available from Asus for my P8Z68 Deluxe
Installed very latest Intel NIC and Intel chipset drivers
Force-uninstalled USB Controllers in Device Manager (rebooted so Windows reinstalls usbport.sys)
Uninstalled all related Logitech software, and some old stuff I no longer use.
Uninstalled USB audio driver (Xonar U7) and installed again
Uninstalled AMD 15.4 beta drive, cleaned thoroughly with CCleaner and DDU, installed again
Turned off C1E in BIOS and even tried turning off EIST
Adjusted power plan settings
Probably a few other things that I'm now forgetting.

I'm beginning to think, because it does not happen in the UEFI BIOS, nor in Safe Mode, that it must be some Windows software issue. I was hoping some driver uninstall/reinstall process, or an update, would solve it, or specific software uninstalled would fix it up. Now, I think it's just the latest AMD beta driver. I wish it wasn't, because I need that version for GTA V and its Crossfire profile.

I guess I'll have to give it some time, see if I can turn my mind off of it for now (or just more often have the TV on or music playing), and hope that the next AMD driver fixes it. I suspect the actual noise IS from the GPU, it makes sense considering extra phases for some reason, at least as evidenced by the lights on the card, are being used more during mouse movement. I don't know if that means it is entirely the GPU or if other software is pushing some load toward the GPU for some reason. But watching in Afterburner and GPU-Z, there isn't actually any extra load or extra voltage during these moments.

 

[mfenn]

It sounds like what you're hearing is coil whine from the GPU. Who knows why the CPU is being more heavily loaded when moving the mouse around than before, certainly a driver change could cause that. As a random thought, what happens if you switch to the Windows Basic (non 3D-accelerated) theme?

 

[bononos]

The mouse may be buzzing/whining on its own as well. The mx518 did have a high pitched whine, and it was one problem that many had with the g500. Not sure of the 502 model fixed it.

 

[destrekor]

The mouse may be buzzing/whining on its own as well. The mx518 did have a high pitched whine, and it was one problem that many had with the g500. Not sure of the 502 model fixed it.

The mouse is perfectly silent.

 

[destrekor]

Well, I have a perfect example as to why you shouldn't necessarily just update everything to the absolutely latest driver version. This is especially true when comparing versions offered from your motherboard manufacturer and those available directly from the underlying hardware developer, in this case Intel.

I used Intel's driver scan and update tool to grab the latest chipset and latest NIC driver.

Well, to check progress on different fixes, I have been checking the DPC count, ISR count, and executing times using LatencyMon (focusing on usbport.sys, which has the highest numbers at the moment).

Sadly, overall process latency measurements were skyrocketing at random intervals, and LatencyMon was stating those results would be bad for audio and likely produce dropouts.

I used my Restore Point from before I removed uninstalled the USB controllers, checked some changes in BIOS for ports I do not use and had disabled, and checked latency again. Still bad.

So I decided to rollback to the earlier driver for my NIC, which was the latest that Asus provided. The latency issue was immediately resolved.

I'm sticking here for now, because I can't imagine I can root out the issue at this point. I'm going to check on Logitech's forums to see if I can install an older firmware for the mouse, just to see if that is actually causing the coil whine from, presumably, the GPU. I've witnessed stranger things, so who knows. Otherwise, I suspect it's the GPU driver possibly conflicting with the current configuration of my system in some way.

I likely really, really need to completely wipe the system and start fresh, but I don't really want to do that before Windows 10 rolls out (which I plan to grab on day 1, most likely). And considering I also plan to start looking into a complete new system build in less than a year, I might decide to even upgrade directly to Windows 10 on this build, and start fresh on the next. I've had this system running without a total format since I built it with Windows 7 in late 2011. Windows has handled upgrades far better than ever, and I've maintained the kind of performance I should expect based on varying hardware and game reviews. So I've got a ton of customization that I don't want to wipe clean, it'll be a long-term pain in the ass until I have it how I like again. :\ I'm also lazy, lol.
Who knows, if little quirks keep popping up, I might just get frustrated enough to finally commit to a format.

 

[coercitiv]

I'm going to check on Logitech's forums to see if I can install an older firmware for the mouse, just to see if that is actually causing the coil whine from, presumably, the GPU. I've witnessed stranger things, so who knows. Otherwise, I suspect it's the GPU driver possibly conflicting with the current configuration of my system in some way.

If you have this problem with the Logitech Gaming Software uninstalled then this is not gonna help, but if you're still using it then you might want to read this. TLDR version is to disable UI hardware acceleration in Logitech Gaming Software and see if it anything changes. (if coilwhine is from the graphics card ofc)

Just to help you write off other possible conflicts, I use G602 with the Gaming Software and Xonar U7 and have yet to notice and conflicts between them under Win 8.1

PS: CPU usage (and related coilwhine) is not to be excluded either, since moving the mouse around on a system with 2c/4t Haswell @ 2.6Ghz results in 3-4% CPU usage @125Hz and 6-8% @500Hz. Without the Gaming Software CPU usage is more consistent and reaches only the minimum values mentioned earlier.

 

[hasu]

I had similar problem before, but IIRC the sound was coming from speakers.

 

[mfenn]

What we typically refer to as "coil whine" is fundamentally a physical issue caused by surface mount components (usually ICs) vibrating against the PCB substrate. Once you can isolate the source of the noise to a small region (using an empty paper towel roll as a makeshift ear trumpet works decently well), you can lightly press on each surface mount IC in that region while triggering the noise. Once you find the IC or ICs that are causing the noise, you can apply some hot glue or clear nail polish around the edges to provide vibration dampening.