Incredibly, unbeliveably loud coil whine

[da na]

I'm not exaggerating with the title. I have a ThinkCentre with an early Core 2 Duo (don't know much more about it, got it from the trash and can't find much info about it) that makes squealing sounds while in use.

It's not through the PC speaker, it's coming from the motherboard. Not the HDD, not fans... and it's actually louder than an SSD. It's the level of volume where it can be heard across a small room. It seems to get higher pitch and louder for higher CPU usage and happens most on Firefox.

Is there any actual fix for this other than taking it back to the ewaste and using a different PC? It gets quite hot so I don't want to add any padding, etc as not to cook the poor thing.

Any help would be appreciated!

[emosun]

if the machine is that old theres no reasonable fix short of just using a machine that doesn;t do that , could at least try a different power supply on it to see if the psu is just old and making bad power

[BondiBlue]

Check the power supply. A whining noise that changes with different CPU loads can be the PSU. 

[da na]

3 minutes ago, emosun said:

if the machine is that old theres no reasonable fix short of just using a machine that doesn;t do that , could at least try a different power supply on it to see if the psu is just old and making bad power

 

2 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Check the power supply. A whining noise that changes with different CPU loads can be the PSU. 

Will do.

To be fair... the PSU looks like it got kicked at some point, huge dent in the back. I assume that could be the issue.

[Guest]

That's how my 1kw PSU sounded when I was benching the GTX 580s and GTX 480 on water. It would change pitch with scene changes and camera angles. Quite impressive. The bigger the load, the louder it got. That was last December. 

 

The PSU was then moved to my case to drive a daily. All is good and quiet F@H with a 2060 lol. 

 

So really, try a different PSU if you have one .... guessing proprietary, so not. 

 

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, ShrimpBrime said:

That's how my 1kw PSU sounded when I was benching the GTX 580s and GTX 480 on water. It would change pitch with scene changes and camera angles.

Are you sure the sound was actually coming from the PSU???

 

Because that's exactly what my GPU (Nvidia RTX 3070) does above 300fps or so... at 600 fps it starts to become really hilarious... like an alarm siren or something! 

 

Just curious why the PSU itself would make this sound?

 

 

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, Mel0nMan said:

Will do.

I agree,  changing the psu might fix it, my initial idea however was, if you can pin point the source exactly,  on the motherboard,  you could try with some none conductive silicone glue around the actual coil - if it's accessible - maybe something to try if changing the psu doesn't fix it, and yeah i know it's a wild suggestion,  just an idea. I did this at my old work with "tags" for oil rigs we custom made, it wasn't for coilwhine but simply to make the whole device more sturdy... (had to survive a fall from 2m or so iirc)

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Are you sure the sound was actually coming from the PSU???

 

Because that's exactly what my GPU (Nvidia RTX 3070) does above 300fps or so... at 600 fps it starts to become really hilarious... like an alarm siren or something! 

 

Just curious why the PSU itself would make this sound?

 

 

Very sure, the PSU on the bench is very distinguishable when not in a case.

 

Had a couple GPUs with coil whine too. Not as bad as the PSU though.

 

PSU has the biggest coils, current can become audible at certain frequencies. I just feel bad for the dog lol.