A few months ago, my HD5770 started emitting a low buzzing noise, even at idle (very low load on the GPU and 20% fan speed). I have tried cleaning the card of dust, but it did not help. I have read that it's perfectly normal for this particular card to emit this low buzzing noise, but I find it incredibly annoying as my rig is otherwise pretty silent.

I am using the second revision of the card as shown here -

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3596

Have any other users noticed similar problems? Would an aftermarket cooler help alleviate the problem?

I have the same card - no buzzing.

Is it the fan or is it coil whine that you are hearing?

I'm pretty sure it's the fan. I suppose I could unplug it and boot straight into the BIOS in order to avoid damage. That way, I would be able to tell. Would that be too risky?

Open up the case with power off. put your finger between the fan blades to keep it from starting up - then turn on the PC to see if there is a buzz. It won't hurt the fan if you do this for a few seconds.

So I tried unplugging both of the case fans and stopping the GPU fan. Only the PSU fan and the CPU were active. At startup, the buzzing sound was still heard, and since the CPU fan (using a CM212+) only spun at around 300rpm, I'm fairly confident that the PSU is to blame.

It's a Corsair 620HX and it seems like I'm not the only person who has experienced this problem in the past -

http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread. ... hx620+buzz
http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread. ... hx620+buzz

It's a shame that the warranty has expired. Looks like I might be in the market for a new PSU then...

It's coil whine and not fan noise from the PSU, then? If the latter, replace the fan. It's not that hard to do. Heck, your warranty has expired. You can experiment. If it turns out to be coil whine, you can try putting non-electrically conductive epoxy or RTV on the coils to stop the buzz.

I'm not really familiar with how coil whine sounds, so I'm not sure if that's what it is.

http://www.youtube.com/user/majiktheory ... p_axOyd1Z8 - would that be an example of coil whine? If so, it's not quite what I'm hearing.

At any rate, you of course have a very good point about simply replacing the fan. I'll definitely look into that. I have never disassembled a PSU unit before, so I didn't consider it at first.
I will also be building a new desktop very soon (next week or the week afterwards) and I'll try to carry over the 620HX in order to see if it might be interferance with other components in my current desktop that is causing the issue. I'll try giving it a thorough cleaning as well to see if that helps.

Again, you can maybe stick a pencil or something between the psu grill to stop the fan...if the noise goes away, then it's the fan. There's a couple of posts here...and I think there is an old article by Mike C on fan replacement. Lots of people have replaced the fans on their Corsair PSUs (including me).

Turns it out was the PSU that was loaded with dust. That's a problem with the P180 coupled with Corsair's PSU's which place their fan in an up/down orientation - you can't really clean the PSU without completely pulling it out.

I have my new system up and running now - Core i5 2500K /w Scythe Mugen 2 rev. B, ASRock Z68 Extreme 4, 128GB C300, 8GB DDR3 1600 and the HX620 and I am simply amazed at how quiet it is! I'm only running two chassis fans and the Scythe fan and it's barely audible when using the "Level 1" fan option in the BIOS (I think those fans are running around 500 RPM).

I feel bad about having to add back my HD 5770 and Hitachi 7k2 HDD. I definitely feel like replacing that sucker fan on the 5770 now

Sorry for the misleading title. Sometimes we feel certain about the origin of the noise of our rigs, but it turns out that we were in error.

Congrats on isolating and fixing the problem - as well as the new build

Consider this: Your PC is a metal box. It's not suprising how sounds reflect around inside. So, no shame on you.

How do you like the Asrock mobo and bios...or is it UEFI?

Thanks

This motherboard uses UEFI. I don't really care for mouse support, as keyboard navigation is quicker anyway. I do like the options to that allow you to semi-manually control up to 3 chassis fans as well as the CPU fan if you connect them to the board's headers (obviously). You can't directly enter RPM values (that would be awesome), but you can set the fans to operate at different "levels". How exactly those levels are calculated into RPM speeds, I'm not sure of.

Apart from that I am also very impressed by how extremely quick it POSTs - it only takes a few seconds and is nowhere near as slow as my old 965P-DS4.

cool.