Hei

So my new mATX build is rdy but I ran into the weirdest problem ever, when I for example play CS GO I get a high hiss static sound from the VGA card (its not coil whine I think).

Now here is the weird part, if I remove the DVI cable the problem is gone (yes I tried other cables). Lets say I remove the monitor from the AC and just connect the DVI cable I still get the hiss sound, when I remove the cable its gone and the game is still running ofc.

I have tried so many things that I don't kno what to do anymore. Tried other mobos from work, other psu's, other cpu's, other gfx (ati and nvidia).

If anyone could help me brainstorm a little it would be nice because I dno anymore :S

It could just be that the noise is on the output side of the card and without any live monitor connected and switched on, there is no noise. Have you tried VGA or display port instead?

There can't be any AC power issue as that would only be the case if the monitor was plugged in at the time.

Yea I tried DP & hdmi aswell. When I limit frames to 100 the noise pretty much goes away aswell.

Or if I remove the DVI cable it is gone aswell (even if the monitor is not powered on I need to remove dvi cable for this sound to be gone).

This is only in games btw.

Yes, but what about VGA? DP, HDMI and DVI are signal wise the same. Get a DVI-VGA adaptor and try with VGA to see if it's a difference. I doubt there will be but might be interesting to try.


As I was saying this proves that it is not a mains power issue.

As an aside, unless your monitor can run >100Hz, why don't you frame-limit the game? Besides the noise issue, all you are doing is using more power/generating more heat/making the card's fan run faster/generating more fan noise...

On topic - it's probably just a "feature" of running the card at full load. I bet a choke or capacitor in the VRM circuitry is whining/oscillating. When you remove the output cable, you are removing a significant load on the gfx card - the GPU's output drivers only see the capacitance of the gfx board+connector and not the cable+monitor's connector/board/input buffer.

Thanks for the brainstorming, I will do some more test. But I am almost sure it has something to do with the latest nvidia drivers.

Got a Asus GTX660TI home from work to do some quick tests on aswell.

The persuit of a silent gaming machine is like a drug

Gonna up some pics this week of the rig also, it looks slick atm <3 I first sleeved one of my golden king's 550w but ended up using a non sleeved. The fractal mini is a pain for cable management behind the tray imo.

I seem to have found the problem but not what is causing it.

Using the GTX 660TI now, as soon as I start playing CS GO the GPU gets a full load... its like its going in overclock mode or something. The fans start gong to 3K RPM in like 10seconds.

At 10seconds into the game it has like 350TDP...

Something is way off here.

Does the 660 Ti make a similar noise?

Again, try using the frame limiter and see if the problem goes away. It might just be that CS GO sucks at resource management.

I don't wanna use frame limiter in CS GO.

I am starting to think its cs go + nvidia drivers causing this. In league of legends I don't have any problems even at 400/500FPS.

Furmark does not give this problem either.

I need to find a driver that does not use this "prefered refreshrate" thingy, dno whats it called in english on the nvidia panel, it comes after vsync.

It might sound a longshot but can you try with a different PSU? Sometimes graphics card noises can be linked to the PSU in use. It's NOT that the PSU makes the noise itself, it's just that the quality of voltages coming to the card can make a difference.


I know this will be one of those gamer things that playing with less than 5 million fps makes the game anecdotally "unplayable" (we used to play Quake comfortably at 20fps, kids these days are spoilt ) but if the noise is that annoying, can't it be worth trying?


I doubt that game is going to be graphics limited but CPU limited. Higher framerate in anything generally means the CPU is under higher stress than GPU. If the graphics card won't be under anything like the load it would not be much of a surprise for it to not squeal as if in pain.