I have an msi lightning 680 with twin frozr fans. I have an irritating high pitch ring coming from the card when the fans go above 1600 rpm. At first i thought it was coil whine but further investigation suggests its the fans. I noticed that my cool master evo 212 fan does it as well when set to high rpm. My other case fans dont go that high in rpm, so i cant try them out at those speeds, but im guessing that the high pitch sound is partly due to the heatsink fins that the cpu and gpu fans are connected to. Am i correct on my assumption? Is this a common problem faced with gpu and cpu fans, and is there any way to get rid of it without changing the fans/sink? Maybe by putting dampening material on the heatsink or the all around the case...please advise

Thanks

1600rpm is pretty fast in itself but whether or not a high pitch squeal would be emitted depends upon the fan. Turbulence through heatsink fans could be a problem but normally wouldn't be so high pitch. With something like the GTX680 you are not going to get particularly quiet operation even when an AIB produces a non-reference cooler design. If you do not want to change the cooler then you could try undervolting the GPU to reduce power consumption and therefore reduce the fan speed requirement.

Adding dampening material to the heatsink itself doesn't sound good. You could either harm airflow through it or worse: short something out on the card. Adding dampening material to the case is not as worthwhile as stopping the noise in the first place by swapping coolers on offending components.

Thank you for the advice.

I should also add that i have a corsair c70 case, probably not the most silent case in the world either. It has a side window with fan vents and vents at the top as well.I just found out that corsair sells a side panel without the window. Do you think swapping the windowed panel for the windowless one would help out much? I cant do anything about the top vents besides covering them with something