gpu coil whine in only certain games, but not necessarily high fps ones?

[gfaiii]

Hi everyone,

I have an asus rog 1080 ti and the coil whine is pretty quiet I'm more just curious about a few things related to it.

When I play games like PUBG or fortnite, that are capping me to 144 fps to sync with my refresh rate, I get a coil whine in there. But then when I start up a game like csgo I don't have much coil whine even though I'm sitting at 298 fps pretty much the whole time.

I thought that high frame rates is what induces coil whine and not the demanding graphics of the game. (for instance, I started up darksiders II one time and that had like 12k frames going and i thought my gpu was going to explode from the whine.)

 

[cherry blossoms]

Coil whine can be from a variety of factors. For Your GPU, you can try Nvidia Profile Inspector to set limits on framerates. You can do this on a global or per program basis. Would have to reset this every time you update your drivers.

Coil whine can also occur in certain programs with c-states on (CPU related). Would have to disable C-states (no throttling down to conserve power)

 

[gfaiii]

i probably wouldn't limit my fps since I have vsync/gsync on most of the time to work at 144 fps/hz...

another example is in the menu of fortnite it says i'm getting 144 fps but the coil whine is pretty quiet, but when i will do certain things like click on a hero to uppgrade (zooms in close on their 3d character model) the coil whine will get noticeably louder (still at 144 fps) and when i return to menu the coil whine resumes to the quieter whine before zooming in on the 3d model... i just thought that was weird because most people have attributed it to high frames and it seems to be not related to that for me.

Do you think that the example i was just explaining from fortnite could be attributed to what you're saying about c-states? I have my i7 7700k (corsair liquid cooling) overclocked to 48 48 47 47 on the 4 cores and something like 1.32 volts i think

 

[cherry blossoms]

The VRMs in your computer are inductors that have a certain resonance and resonating frequency. These are typically most commonly associated with your GPU, Motherboard, and Power supply. The resonance may be often at its worst with the most current, hence the most noise if it is occurring at max power for any particular inductor (that may be causing the noise). The resonance doesn't have to be at max output, but whining during higher frames (like menus, where the card can literally be able to draw 100's of frames because it isn't being challenged) is one symptom that shows that for that particular inductor.

Depending on what resources the scene is using, it may be helpful to monitor your GPU Vs CPU usage during that scene, it may give you a better idea of what resources are being pushed. Limited c-states (since you are overclocking you probably already set them off to stay at 100% of your overclock all the time) Might help you narrow it down where it's coming from.

Realistically, what can you do about it? Unless you want to glop silicon down on the affected vrm (reduces apparent vibration, retains heat..not so good) you probably just want to live with it. I suspect you don't want to try running at stock clocks / voltages to see if it helps.