Terrible coil whine from motherboard

[L. Kenter]

Hi everyone,

 

Over the past few weeks I have been steadily upgrading my rig with mostly silence in mind, but of course also performance. 

I upgraded my GPU, RAM, motherboard, PSU and swapped out my SSHD for an M.2 NVME. 

And now my PC makes this horrible coil whine. 

 

Current components:

 

- 7700k stock with NH-D15

- ROG Strix Z270H Gaming

- 2x8GB HyperX Fury 3466Mhz

- MSI GT710 (temporary backup card till my RTX 2080 arrives)

- Unbranded USB C PCIE expansion card

- Samsung 960 Evo 250GB + Kingston A1000 960GB 

- Corsair HX1200i

- PowerMac G5 modded case with a couple of Noctua Redux fans

 

After a lot of research and troubleshooting I manged to isolate the problem to the motherboard.

I tried:

- Messing around with the BIOS C-state settings and other power saving features

- Read that a long stress-test could remove coil whine so did that too

- Different power supplies

- Different graphics cards (including none)

- Different motherboards

- Different RAM

- Different storage

 

Only when I tried my CPU in my old Asus Z170K motherboard the coil whine was almost gone. Still slightly audible but probably never noticed it before since it's always been in a case. 

However, with this new motherboard the coil whine is clearly audible even when inside the case.

The only constant factor in this whole test scenario is the CPU, which can't possibly be the source since it doesn't have any coils, right?

 

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to remove or at least reduce this obnoxious noise or should I just ask for a refund and get another motherboard?

 

Thanks!

 

 

[Spoonii]

If you are sure your mobo is the cause of this, then an RMA might be a good option.

However there is no guarantee that any other mobo won't do the same if your hearing is that sensitive.

 

I have seen some videos where people add sound dampening material to the insides of the case.

Of course your mileage may vary.

 

[L. Kenter]

I was planning on doing that anyway but I'm afraid it won't help much against the high-pitched whine so I guess I'll have to replace it... Thanks for the reply!