Question My MSI RTX 4070 Ventus 2X is having coil whine in high FPS games only, should I return for a replacement?

[acoolrocket]

So new unit and I'm still within the return window.

To try reduce the coil whine, I did a 7 hour looping benchmark in Dirt Rally everyday for the past week and a half which some says settles the coil whine. The noise has slightly improved, but nothing to say that it worked, maybe its psuedo, but idk. I have till October 28th btw if this is something I can continue to carry on to see/hear if the noise further reduces.

I'm aware of undervolting, but I like to keep it at stock settings, and for the FPS limit, I had to turn it down all the way to 60FPS to notice an actual improvement after trying 144/120/100, but going from 170FPS to 60FPS on a 240Hz monitor is no bueno.

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I can definitely say this is thankfully just a case in high FPS gaming because I tried every other GPU use case from rendering/viewport stuff in Blender, using Stable Diffusion/Photoshop and the likes with no coil whine.

As such since I game with headphones on anyways, should I brush this off or get a replacement GPU if this is an unlikely case, or even more try another dual fan RTX 4070 that's more likely to not have coil whine?

 

[Lutfij]

Are you using the PSU mentioned in this thread;

Question - coil whine on PSU, should I continue to use

Thread title: My PSU coil whine that started a couple days ago has kept a constant semi-loud noise for sometime whilst I wait for my replacement, should I still use Title pretty much, its a Corsair CX550F RGB, 80 PLUS Bronze (White). 1 and 1/2 years old. As expected only happens when the PSU...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[acoolrocket]

Are you using the PSU mentioned in this thread;

Question - coil whine on PSU, should I continue to use

Thread title: My PSU coil whine that started a couple days ago has kept a constant semi-loud noise for sometime whilst I wait for my replacement, should I still use Title pretty much, its a Corsair CX550F RGB, 80 PLUS Bronze (White). 1 and 1/2 years old. As expected only happens when the PSU...

forums.tomshardware.com

Nope, got that RMA'd and replaced with a new RM650 (I know free upgrade, they did since they ran out of 550W PSUs and obviously didn't want to downgrade me.

 

[Phaaze88]

As such since I game with headphones on anyways, should I brush this off...

You can just brush it off. It's a nuisance, but not harmful in any way.
There is a correlation between high fps and coil whine; it is more likely to occur in high fps scenarios, especially in menus with no caps.
You can try to replace the gpu, but no brand is immune to coil whine, so it's entirely possible to get another gpu that whines.

 

[Order 66]

You can just brush it off. It's a nuisance, but not harmful in any way.
There is a correlation between high fps and coil whine; it is more likely to occur in high fps scenarios, especially in menus with no caps.
You can try to replace the gpu, but no brand is immune to coil whine, so it's entirely possible to get another gpu that whines.

what is coil whine caused by?

 

[Phaaze88]

what is coil whine caused by?

Coils and chokes vibrating... really, really, fast, plus the manufacturer pushing the product outside the optimal operating range.

Have you seen any of the news articles where the gpu is tested with lower power limits, but doesn't lose much in the way of overall performance?

 

[Order 66]

Have you seen any of the news articles where the gpu is tested with lower power limits, but doesn't lose much in the way of overall performance?

yes, isn't the same concept as undervolting a CPU in that it lowers power and (with CPUs anyway) improves performance by allowing higher boost clocks for longer.

 

[Phaaze88]

yes, isn't the same concept as undervolting a CPU in that it lowers power and (with CPUs anyway) improves performance by allowing higher boost clocks for longer.

Depends on the cpu and the application running. For Intel's cpus, they'll give you max speed, even if the cores are a couple C away from Tjmax - it'll still back off a little when power limit comes into play.
For Ryzen 3000 and above, and today's gpus, they behave as you posted.

They're pushing these things harder than necessary out of the box.
It's nuts to me that non-LN2 OCing is still pursued, when the manufacturer 'took it away'. Long gone are the days of achieving an extra 1ghz OC from the Sandy Bridge era.

 

[Order 66]

It's nuts to me that non-LN2 OCing is still pursued, when the manufacturer 'took it away'. Long gone are the days of achieving an extra 1ghz OC from the Sandy Bridge era.

What do you mean? (I am too young to remember Sandy Bridge)

 

[Phaaze88]

What do you mean? (I am too young to remember Sandy Bridge)

Folks could take those 2500K and 2600Ks with their 3.7 and 3.8ghz boost clocks, and easily OC about 1ghz more out of them using big air coolers and AIOs. Intel didn't launch the chips pre-overclocked - they were good as is, but had lots of headroom... and AMD didn't have a counter for them at the time.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I've had coil whine in the past and what I did to correct it was cap my FPS to my monitor's max output. If you have a 60Hz monitor, cap your FPS in your driver package at 60. If it's 144Hz, cap it at 144 FPS, etc.

That should eliminate the coil whine altogether as well as reducing the workload on your GPU without taking anything away from your overall experience. The only thing that 240+FPS does is cause coil whine and screen tearing on displays that are below 240Hz (which would be 99.9999% of them).