Nexus value 430 whining problem with Ubuntu 10.10

[sleepygrad]

Alright.

This is a weird one.

My nexus 430 intermittently whines when my computer is more or less idle. High pitch whine. However, it only happens on Ubuntu 10.10, it does NOT happen on 10.04 OR windows 7.

ANYONE have a clue why?

To test that it was my upgrade from .04 to .10 that caused this new sound I also threw 10.04 and 10.10 on flash drives and tried them. Sure enough 10.04 does not whine when using the OS from the flash drive but 10.10 does!

The whine will begin about 5ish seconds after the 10.10 log on screen and happens whenever im not actively doing something (at the moment, i am running pandora and no whine, but if i turn pandora off and just surf ... whine whine whine!)

In the Ubuntu IRC channel no-one knew of any major power requirement differences between 10.04 and 10.10. They thought it was faulty hardware.

no overclocking

SETUP:
intel i5 quad core w/ thurmalright huge heatsink + 2 nexus ultra quite 120mm fans
Antec Solo
8gb of ram 1600
7600 gpu
1gb WD black (sometimes ill use my second 1gb wd black, for my win 7 install)
Both WD black drives are in hard drive silencers.
wireless card
gigabyte p55 mobo (more details if necessary)

[quest_for_silence]

Have you any spare videocard to swap temporarily your 7600 (and then re-try the .10)?

[sleepygrad]

Not Pci-E video cards. My video card is fanless.

Do you think its drawing to much power for .10?

[Mats]

Any difference if you raise the power usage by adding fans or USB units?

If it does, maybe you should have it connected permanently. It's not the best solution, but I don't think you'll have much options.


What if you disable Speedstep? If that changes anything, you can either keep it that way, or start fiddling with Vcore and multipiers.

[zoran89]

i read somewhere that linux drivers sometimes have a problem with load/iddle transitions ..... i had ubuntu on my notebook and somethimes cpu load remained high even when it should be iddle ... i am not an expert on this, i am just telling you what happened to me...

[mastabog]

I have experienced this in the past with different PSUs and software. My older Nexus 500w (NX-8050 which has just died, bastard!) was instantly starting to whine when Trillian Astra alpha was being loaded and stopped whining when Trillian was closed ... looking in the task manager/process explorer I wasn't seeing any CPU usage for Trillian. However, looking at the Trillian active threads with process explorer, there was one thread that was continuously doing memory reads.

I wrote to the Trillian team about it (who evidently thought I was an idiot) but after I explained the problem in more detail, they understood and actually fixed it in a later version.

You could try killing processes one by one (or removing kernel modules) and see if the whine goes away. You may be surprised.

Otherwise, there may be nothing you can do about it (even adding an extra fan or increasing the speed to an existing fan may not fix it) ... it appears that some PSUs have specific load configurations/patterns that can cause a whine. You seem to be just as unlucky as I was.

[Das_Saunamies]

My guess: power whine from video card due to high FPS and not actually the PSU at all. All it takes is one component that is not optimized/vsynced that has FPS in the high hundreds and bingo.

Some 7600 series card should not tax a 430W quality PSU. For reference, a clocked 7600 GT: http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/video/xf ... er.gif.gif

[mastabog]

My guess: power whine from video card due to high FPS and not actually the PSU at all. All it takes is one component that is not optimized/vsynced that has FPS in the high hundreds and bingo.

In my case (see my post above) there was no 3D app running at all and the 2D image was changing as I was playing with windowed apps ... when trillian alpha was loaded the PSU was whining (and it was the PSU, not another part, I identified the source well enough); when trillian was shut down, the whine was gone.