[SOLVED] Weird buzzing sound coming from video card

[dalobu]

About two week ago I started to notice this buzzing sound coming from my GPU. It only happens when the GPU is under load. I normally only play League of Legends (I don’t hear anything) and Guild Wars 2 (I hear it depending of what I am looking in the game and on some maps).

To push the card, I installed The Witcher 3 and the sound happens from the moment the game is loaded until I close it. The game runs fine, so far I haven’t had a single crash, bluescreen, graphic glitch or shutdown. I haven’t noticed a single performance drop.

Temperatures: The CPU rarely goes up from 60c. The GPU while running the Witcher stays at 70-75c

I already cleaned the whole pc, so I don’t think is dust. I checked the GPU fans and they are spinning fine. I manually set them to 100% and they sound normal.

I have never overclocked anything on the pc and I have the latest drivers (461.72)

SOUND

I've never heard it before, could it be Coil Whine?
I know my pc is old, could the PSU cause this?

PC Specs (Built in 2012):
CPU: i7-3770K
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100
Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V DELUXE
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (2017)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 G1 Gaming (2016)
PSU: Corsair Enthusiast Series 850-Watt 80 Plus Bronze

 

[InvalidError]

I've never heard it before, could it be Coil Whine?
I know my pc is old, could the PSU cause this?

If the sound is relatively high-pitched, it can be coil or even capacitor whine. Some components or combinations thereof are more prone to whine than others and isn't necessarily indicative of any actual issue beyond being annoying to some people.

If the noise suddenly appeared, try to remember anything you may have changed around that time.

 

[dalobu]

The sound is not high-pitched. It's more like a rattling sound, not really constant, it fluctuates depending of what I am doing in the game, and I really don't think is the fans.

I haven't changed anything recently. The last time I upgraded my pc was a couple of years ago to replace a faulty ram stick.

The video card is 4 years old, can coil whine or capacitor whine develop over time?

 

[InvalidError]

The sound is not high-pitched. It's more like a rattling sound, not really constant, it fluctuates depending of what I am doing in the game, and I really don't think is the fans.

A simple way to make sure it isn't the fans is to slow them down by slowly pushing the fan blades down near the middle. A low-pitched rattle would be more consistent with a mechanical than electrical issue.

Whine issues can come up at any time for multiple reasons that aren't necessarily related to the GPU. For example, coil whine can pop up after a PSU swap simply because the new PSU has different load transient response characteristics than the previous one and trigger coil whine in a way that the previous PSU didn't. Same can happen due to aging of the PSU's output capacitors letting more noise through so the GPU's VRM acoustically gets noisier because it has to modulate its output to compensate for the noisier input and you end up hearing whine due to variations in magnetostriction in coils or piezo-acoustic effect in ceramic capacitors. It could even change with software updates altering things like CPU/chipset power management enough that the GPU's VRM now has to cope with electrical noise it didn't have to before.