Question Coil Whine / GPU / FPS / Monitor - A fix, but why?

[Letto]

Hi all

Bought myself a new rig recently after the death of my long serving GTX970 (RIP). The first one arrived with an MSI Ventus RTX 2070 GP in it (didnt fancy the extra £150 for a Super, particularly when im at 1080p at the moment). It had a LOT of coil whine going on with it, in just about every game unless I applied V Sync, and in some cases it still whined anyway. So, I thought, must be a duff card and went down the RMA route. So I get a new system of almost exactly the same spec but this time with a Gigabyte RTX 2070 Windforce 2.0. The same thing still happens, much to my annoyance, just not quite as loud. Heaven produces some great frame rates on Ultra with all bells and whistles applied (150+ nearly all the time) but the coil whine is still real bad. However, I get practically zero coil whine if i apply VSync in Heaven. So that got me looking at various other games and how to fix them. Some of them worked nicely using VSync within the application, some didnt. So I spent a bit of time trying to work out why. After a lot of tests, basically some games will produce the noise in game (not just the usual uncapped menu screen coil whine that we all know and love) - UNLESS I force a 50/55 FPS limit thru Inspector / X1 / NCP etc. Ive also forced Triple Buffering and "Fast" VSync in NCP which may or may not help, potentially worth trying if other people out there are having the same problem.

So : here is my question for the knowledgable people of Tom's. I have an aging Samsung 1080p 60hz HDTV Monitor. Given the issue seems to go away if I limit the FPS the GPU can provide as an output, is it logical to assume that if I got a new monitor, I could remove the software FPS limiter in place at the moment and get some higher FPS? Or am I still going to have the issue regardless of monitor?

Also... if the above isnt correct... why does this FPS limiting approach seem to remove the coil whine in the first place? Temps / Clock Speed / power usage etc all check out fine in every benchmark ive done.

Cheers!

 

[Letto]

Worth saying as well that I know its the GPU from the old "listen to it down a straw" technique...

 

[Letto]

bit of thread necromancy here, but someone may benefit :

I had a Corsair CV650 PSU in my build before. Its a reasonable PSU, nothing great and nothing special - decent brand as we all know. Im not drawing a massive amount of power in my system (4x case fans, Wraith Prism, NVMe master, SATA HDD slave, RTX2070, 16GB Vengeance RAM) so that PSU was well within its comfort zone. However, I was lucky to be given some vouchers for Currys PC World here in jolly old England and thought - maybe its time I get a proper well-reviewed PSU, get a Gold rated one to bring the PC running cost down, that sort of thing.

So i plumped for the Corsair TX750-M which appears on the "epic" lists here and on JonnyGuru for £90. Just installed and guess what - the coil whine has gone almost completely, even in the most demanding of games (C2077 for example). So even after doing the "straw trick" to suggest the GPU was the issue, changing the PSU has clearly done something. I know this newer unit is much better at regulation so maybe thats the core of the issue.

Basically - im here to be another +1 to the "try a new PSU" approach for those of you out there struggling with getting rid of coil whine. FWIW I went and got another 100w on top of what I had, and went to semi-modular rather than non-modular. Dunno if that makes any difference either.