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Possible to fix coil whine on NVidia GPU Rtx2080 Super?
Fflint:
My main question is: is coil whine caused by coils in such GPUs cards, or capacitors? Also is it possible to identify offending parts?
Now some background info.
I've got my rtx2080 maybe 3 years ago(it is Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GAMING OC 8GC GDDR6). It works fine in games. However when I used it for running AI models I always heard a loud buzzing noise (like coil whine but lower pitch and repeating very quickly). I assumed it is just the PSU (I had a be.quiet pure power 11 650W and I just assumed the card is probably pulling a lot more momentary power than the reported 200W) so I just let it be for a while.
However, I recently replaced my PSU with be quiet Pure Power 12 1000w and I bought a used gigabyte rtx3090 24g oc. The plan is to use both GPUs at the same time for running AI models for a bit and maybe to sell the rtx2080 if I don't need it.
The rtx3090(vram) does heat up pretty quickly, but the card doesn't make any noise. My old rtx2080 still makes the old buzzing noise even with the new PSU. This convinced me it is the card itself.
So I'm wondering, if it is really caused by a coil I should be able to just swap the offending coil and have the card "fixed", but I'm not sure how to identify the offending one as I can't run the card hard with no radiator. Any ideas?
The noise is very annoying, as I said it never happened to me in games before, but I can't really sell it in good conscience without mentioning it and if I do I'll have to lower the price significantly. So I'd prefer to fix it. I have hot air rework equipment and enough experience to swap parts.
I'd love some advice from anyone who successfully fixed a noisy gpu.
DavidAlfa:
AFAIK it's a combination of PWM and coil physical resonance frequencies, just like a guitar.
In some cases the coil might be vibrating inside the ferrite, in others it might be entire coil.
Or it could be some stupid ceramic capacitor due piezolectric effect.
Some people have filled the coil with superglue to stop the vibration, with more or less success.
You may find the problematic coil by covering it with some sort of non conductive clay-like material to dampen the noise.
I had this issue with a Gigabyte B650M DS3H motherboard, apparently a very common issue in these.
It was an incredibly loud ~10KHz brain-drilling noise.
After 3 hours trying to fix it I got a headache sop bad I went to bed full of painkillers and slept for 14 hours!
Solution was return and buying an Asus mobo...
harerod:
DavidAlfa gave the sources for whining coils. A simple remedy would be a drop of superglue on/in the offending coil. The glue will creep into the coil, between the windings and quiet things down. So, why not pop open a new tube of superglue and treat all magnetics on your board?
SiliconWizard:
As he mentioned, the whine could come from a ceramic capacitor as well.
Many graphics cards (and motherboards btw) exhibit some kind of whine coming from the various DC/DC converters, depending on load.
Very loud whine is fortunately the exception, but some kind of subtle high-pitched noise during some specific loads is much more common.
For instance, my Lenovo laptop makes this occasional subtle (but noticeable) whine when maxing out Ethernet throughput while copying files via Ethernet.
The GPU (MSI, AMD chip) of my workstation does also have a subtle whine accompanying the movement of the mouse when I move around complex 3D parts in 3D CAD software. Not loud enough to be annoying, but still there.
harerod:
Of course I have encountered whining capacitors (chip and wound foil) as well. Besides superglue, hot glue or non-acidic silicone may also help to quiet things down. Either a drop or coating the whole component.
However, at some point we should start to consider thermal management, before globbering all over the board.
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