I just got up the courage to hook up my brother's motherboard with the new Seasonic G360, which I bought to replace the faulty OCZ StealthXStream PSU (took me two replacement motherboards before I realised it must be the PSU that was faulty).

Imagine my disappointment to hear an extremely high-pitched whine coming from the G360. It persists for some time even after flicking it's switch to off and even unplugging it from the mains. Has anyone ever experienced this, with this PSU or others, before. Obviously I'll have to send it back as it's horrible!

If I listen closely to my Corsair CX400W (with a fan-swap) I can hear some high-pitched whining-like noise, as you describe. But sitting at my desk, I can't hear it.

Well this was quite audible from several feet away. I had to put my ear near it to identify it was the PSU rather than the motherboard it was coming from. I'm surprised I could hear it so well as I suffer from tinnitus and it's about the same high frequency (maybe 18khz) but it changes slightly in tone, particularly when I power it down. Never heard anything like it from any other PSU I've used.

Sounds really bad so I'd have it replaced as faulty. Just have to ask though, is the outlet grounded?

I should jolly well hope so

It's a 4-way surge suppressing strip plugged into a standard UK 3-pin socket.

This is along the lines of one of my thoughts so as to why people have suffered whining Seasonic PSUs. Some people have had replacements which also whine which may point to an electrical condition. Perhaps what you could try is take the PSU to a friends house and try there? It doesn't strictly help you resolve the whining but it might be useful to be able to work out if there is some electircal setup which causes it.

If you have a multimeter you could measure across the earth terminal of two sockets on different rings. You should get around 1 Ohm resistance. You could also carefully measure the voltage from live to earth and neutral to earth. You can do this with the terminals at the end of a power cable. You should find Live-Earth is around 240V and Neutral-Earth is close to 0V as it will be bonded to it at the substation most likely.

Thanks, I'll certainly try all that as it will be useful if I receive a replacement that also whines.

It's a bit concerning that Seasonic PSUs might whine depending on the electrical supply however, as I'm building this PC for my brother so assuming that my electrical supply is fine and isn't the cause of this whine, I could get a replacement that doesn't whine at my house, only for my brother to report it whines when he plugs it in at his!

This is only a theory so far. I'm just trying to see if there is some explanation to a pattern we see: some people get a Seasonic PSU and have no problems, others get one and have a buzz or whine, then get replacements which also buzz or whine.

Now there may be multiple reasons for the noises but if Seasonic have not had so much success in working this out in their design then maybe it is environmental and they don't see it. I'm used to this issue from my field service experience: Customer complains of a fault, local guy goes out and field test shows problem, returns to manufacturing division, they can not find the fault because of some environmental difference and send it back to the customer without fixing it!

Some time I want to try and plug in my X series without an earth and see what happens.

Also does this whine happen at all loads? I have a very old PSU which is very noticeable at zero load if you jumpstart it with a paperclip with no components connected. When connected to a system it never makes such a noise.

Yeah, I'm just fed up with this though as I had a similar problem with my previous OCZ StealthXStream, where the fan was making a horrendous noise, sent it back to be told they couldn't hear anything, got it back and it was OK (cost me about £30 to send it there and back as well), only for the noise to start up again a few months later. So I changed the fan myself (£12) and then it apparently died completely shortly after (I assumed it was my motherboard first, so bought two replacements, as the PSU worked OK on my Gigabyte board but on my Biostar one would cut out straight after I powered up the board).

So I thought, ho hum, spent £51 on the highly-reviewed G360, which is expensive for a 360W PSU but I wanted something that was quiet and reliable to hopefully avoid the need for my brother to have to replace it for as long as possible, only to find the first time I test it that it's unusable due to this whine!

Anyway, to answer your question I've only tested the G360 connected to a motherboard with CPU (Athlon II X4 630) and 4GB RAM only. I'm not sure what load that would cause but I'm planning to test the PSU alone and jumpstart it to see if it's any different.

I've had 4 psu's plugged into my home's wall socket, all of them whine to some extent, two hx750's, seasonic x560 and another brand.

If it is because the power isn't good quality in my home, how can i test that? Is there some meter i can plug into a wall socket? For all I know my socket might not even be grounded. If it isn't due to an 'electrical condition' then I guess i'm just unlucky.

Second question, are there any psu's that can't coil whine because they have no coils?

Well I tested with nothing connected to the PSU at my house and my parents' and it whines just the same, so it's obviously not something weird about my mains. My Mum could hear it but my Dad couldn't, as he's obviously got a bit of high frequency hearing loss!

My RMA has been raised as a refund, so hopefully that will be straightforward. Now I've got to try and find something else to buy. Any suggestions for something reliable and quiet and around £50? I obviously don't need a lot of power, hence buying the G360 in the first place, as it'll only be running an AMD Athlon II X4 630, 8GB RAM, two HDD and Optical drives and a Nova-T 500 PCI Tuner card. It might get a low power GPU (something like the 512MB 4650) one day but chances are it will probably only ever have the HD4250 IGP.

Maybe the Seasonic S12II-430?

OK, well that kills off that theory. Back to the drawing board on ideas and still I don't see anything from Seasonic about why some people complain of really bad whining and others don't.

Hmm, I was tired when I made my last post so it didn't register that the S12II-430 is still a Seasonic, so I'm not sure that's sensible choice either if their models generally have a problem with whining, or maybe it's restricted just to the G360.

Not sure what other choices there are though. There's the OCZ 500W StealthXStream or OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W, both for about £60 on Amazon but seeing as the original PSU that died on me was a StealthXStream 400W (after the fan first became very loud but intermittently, making me waste £15 sending it back, only to have to pay another £10 to get it back when they couldn't find anything wrong), I'm not inclined to buy another one from them.

Are the Corsair Builder series any good? They've got a 500W for £40.

At this point I think I'd take a bit of noise in exchange for reliability. It's for my brother anyway, who isn't as bothered/obsessive about noise as I am.

I'm not saying he'd be happy with something very intrusive, just that I doubt he'll be bothered if he can hear a bit of air whooshing. As he'll be running a basic system, it will be unlikely to use much watts either, so if there's something that is quiet at low watts but perhaps a bit noisy at high watts, that would be OK as long as he can load the CPU without it going into the noisy zone. As he's only using onboard IGP and doesn't really game, he's not going to be loading a GPU as well as the CPU.

I've had similar symptom with my old Seasonic S12 430W. In the past, it unfortunately ran into bad whining coupled with Gigabyte 2600XT. I managed to solve this whining by swapping 2600XT for ASUS 3650. All things remained the same except VGA card. A few years later, it unfortunately ran into bad whining again paired with new motherboard. At this moment, I upgraded motherboard from MSI K9A2 Neo2 to ASRock 970 Extreme 3. And I managed to solve this whining by swapping Seasonic S12 430W for Enermax Eco80+ 350W. Btw, S12 430W is now running fine in my dad's computer with MSI 880G board.

Conclusion : PSU whining may relate to the combination of energy-consuming components especially like MB, VGA?

Except mine does it when not connected to anything

Anyway, sounds like I should avoid the S12 430W as well then.

As S12-430 was long discontinued at least 5 years ago, it's a moot point in today's market. That said, I think electronic whining may have something to do with component selection/combination of computer, and is not restricted to PSU or Seasonic. As I said before, this particular S12-430 has been running strong in my dad's computer without a hitch. Just my 2 cents.

Yeah I think it's the S12II-430W that's currently available. Still wary of Seasonic though.

As I said, the whining I had with my G360 was with and without it connected to components. I've certainly never experienced it with any other PSU I've had.

Well this article makes it clear that the Corsair Builder series isn't what I'm looking for: http://www.overclock.net/t/654983/on-corsair-psus

What about the Antec 520W Neo Eco Modular? It's 80+ Bronze and has a double ball bearing fan. Only 3yr warranty though, like the Corsair Builder.

Antec Neo Eco is sourced from Seasonic, aka M12 II Bronze. It should be decently quiet, not sure about whining.

I found a good review of it here http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=317192 and it looks good electrically at least.

I guess it's worth taking a chance on and hopefully the M12 II Bronze design differs somewhat from the S12 and G360 design so that it isn't suspectible to the whining problem.

I see there's a Neo Eco 450W which I can get a bit cheaper than the 520W and also seems to have more suppliers. In fact the only supplier I've found for the 520W doesn't supply the modular cables with it, which depending on the captive cables might not matter for my brother's PC but it would be nice to have them in case of future upgrades and I don't know how easy or how expensive it would be to get them separately.

I wonder though whether the Neo Eco 450W is based on the same M12 II Bronze design as the 520W?

I've also seen the Antec HCG 520W which isn't modular but does have a 135mm fan and I read that it's based on a slightly updated Seasonic platform to the Neo Eco. Does anyone know if that's true and if so, whether it really matters? There is a HCG 400W but it's not readily available and where it is, is only a few quid cheaper than the 520W so isn't really a contender.

It's based on the S12II so is also a pretty old design.

OK, so are the S12II and M12II Bronze designs more or less the same, except for the modular part obviously?

doveman --

Sounds like you had a bad sample. I've had several G360s come through the lab, and none exhibited the kind of whining you describe. One is sitting in a HTPC that's always one; the whole system is inaudible. (And, no, I highly doubt they were all cherry picked for me.)

Anyway, one thing I wanted to say: You thought the noise was around 18kHz. I doubt that very much. Too high. Mostly, the audible tonal whining from PSUs is under ~12kHz, and the more audible ones are typically 3~6kHz. There's often a small spike from most PSUs around 10~15kHz, but its often too low to be clearly audible except from very close up.

As to what you can find that doesn't have any electronic noise.... the high efficiency PSUs with the least amount of electronic noise I've come across are the SuperFlower/Kingwin models. Check my reviews of those. That my samples were so quiet doesn't guarantee anything for the samples out in the wild, but the consistency of my findings is encouraging.

Hi Mike

You may well be right but I didn't want to take the chance that the supplier had a bad batch so got a refund. It may well be if I got another elsewhere it would be fine. I'm interested in the Antec Neo Eco now anyway, which I think I can get a bit cheaper than the G360 as well.

I didn't bother checking the pitch of the noise with a generator but just made a rough guess. I've uploaded a short sample I made before returning it if you want to download and listen for yourself. It's only 5MB.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1fDI89 ... sp=sharing

As I said, I've never noticed any other PSUs making electrical noise so I guess I'm OK with whatever electrical noise most PSU's normally make but I'll certainly take a look at the models you mention, thanks.

Just for curiosity, I did a quick visual freq analysis of the wav file you linked. It's complex behavior. You turn the PSU on & the whine has a certain character -- captured in the top graph. After you power it off, the whine continues -- and changes till it stops altogether. The bottom curve is about 5 secs after you turned it off. Weird. I will send this to Seasonic for them to chew over.

Thanks for doing that Mike, it's interesting to see it represented visually (OK, so I was a bit off with 18khz!)

Be interesting to hear what Seasonic reckons might have been causing this as well.

The coil whine issue is something we have been working hard to resolve. Often times it is difficult to pinpoint because the same model, the same batch in production, can end up with coil whine when matched with one MB and absolutely silent when paired with another MB.

As well, we have had instances where the use of a simple power strip resolved the issue or changes in the BIOS settings.

Nevertheless, we have strengthen our QA process and as well, is in process to review further QA improvements.

If you have any coil whine issues, in EU, please send a message to: support@seasoniceu.com and we will try our best to resolve your issue.

Thank you for your support.

Hi

I'm glad to hear you're working to resolve this issue as it's the only thing that lets down the otherwise high quality of the G-360 and your other PSUs.

As mentioned, my unit had this whine whether connected to a motherboard or not and both with a surge-protecting powerstrip at my house and without at my parents.