After upgrading my HD3850 to a 8800GT, I noticed my system was making an annoying whining type sound when I had my head turned at certain angles. Conveniently it was at every angle facing my desk. I spent an hour moving it to different parts of the desk, the floor, angling it parallel to my monitor - you name it, I tried it. So I gave up, thinking I'm going to have to try a HD3870 instead.

Later, I went to the system tray to close uTorrent but I accidently closed Trillian instead. Amazingly, the whining stopped when I did this. That's right, my instant messaging client was causing my system to whine. I never turn it off and it's set to start up on log-in. W. T. F.




Update: some online video sites also make it whine... seems like the integrated NIC or southbridge is the problem.

I get a bit of harddisk seek noise when loading utorrent, but whining, not so much. Odd things are happening in your PC

The site for my online banking makes my Thinkpad X30 whine. No idea why.

Stress on whining components.

I've had some from integrated audio on an nForce 2 board. Never heard of NICs being faulty in that way. Solved it by switching to a separate audio card. Does Trillian initiate sound? Don't know what else it would do to stress power coils or the like.

Yeah... I can basically use Trillian as a switch to make it whine. I must be really sensitive to these things because no one else I know can hear it. Guess thats what happens when you hang around SPCR too long. I will try a discrete NIC later today.

Is there a difference in screen color or brightness with this program and others?

I've had my old newsgroup program make my video card whine when display background was white. Reversing the background to black made it go away. Note: this was inside the actual window, not the desktop background.

I've had SOMETHING whine in my old PC when I played Civilization III and used the in-game scrollbars. Just that. It couldn't be heard anywhere else.

I retired a 5 port 100MBs network switch after a year of service because one of the ports had a stroke... the port would sing (well, a loud tone) and if there was any ethernet activity the tone would fluctuate between a couple different pitches.

I just disabled the onboard ethernet and installed a D-Link 10/100 NIC... problem persists.

What causes it:
-Trillian (even if it's just sitting idle in the background)
-downloading Usenet headers
-anything with Flash
-audio & video files (muted so it doesn't drown it out)
-even hovering over audio & video files sets it off

What doesn't:
-AIM
-BitTorrent traffic

It'd be funny if it wasn't annoying.

It might come from the level of cpu load. Try playing around with RMClock.

I just posted about this in another thread:

Every time I fire up the game Crysis Demo, my PC emits a high pitch. It happened after I installed a new 8800GT, so i believe it is the video card rather than some other component.

Power issue or CPU then? (both for Crysis and the OP)

I've come across graphics cards that were indeed in such throes that they'd whine with certain signals, like a white background or scrolling. Or was that the monitor...

This kind of whining almost always comes from a power supply (either the main supply, or one of the VRMs on the motherboard or graphics card). It is typically load dependent, and most often happens at relatively low loads (but rarely at idle).

The root cause is that these supplies are switching power supplies, which means that they alternate between full voltage and zero voltage at a variable but usually high frequency, feeding through some inductors into a set of capacitors to smooth the output voltage. The noise you hear is when the on/off frequency chosen by the switcher corresponds to the physical resonance of one of the downstream parts (typically an inductor).

Sometimes you can get rid of the sound with some epoxy, but this is neither certain nor particularly easy.

Getting a very similar noise from my 8800GT whenever I run any 3D-intensive game, but it's less of a whine. More of a high frequency whoosh. Very hard to describe ... it's far less annoying, however, than typical PSU coil whine.

What's even weirder is that the fan controller on the card isn't involved: it's passively cooled with an AC Accelero S1.

What he said.

Oh, i have an interesting one too.

My screen, a Viewsonic VG712s has built in speakers. If i have those connected to the computer, whenever I move the mouse there's a sound, a bit like a slow rather quiet electrical shaver. If i use the same audio port with any other speakers, i get great audio. Feel free to speculate

I like the screen despite that though, as I don't care about the built-in speakers.