Help me with this problem!
Help me with this problem!
I've been searching for answers all day and feeling really tired with no progress. The situation is quite complicated, so please give me a moment. Initially, I played a game and noticed this annoying scratchy or grindy noise. It only came through when I removed my headset. I was puzzled because I've owned my PC for about a year and a half and hadn't heard this before. It seemed to happen mainly at high frame rates, leading me to suspect GPU whine. However, after trying it out, it didn’t match the typical whine sound—I felt more like hearing a grind or scratch.
I managed to resolve the issue by lowering my GPU voltage, which eliminated the noise in about 8 out of 10 games. The sound appeared to be related to fans rather than the GPU itself. I noticed it would intermittently stop and restart, suggesting a fan problem. To figure this out, I opened MSI Afterburner while playing the game and checked fan speeds. I tried adjusting my GPU fan speed via MSI afterburner and observed whether the noise changed.
After setting the fan speed to 70, the noise appeared for 10 seconds before disappearing after about 15 seconds of running. This made me think it might be a case fan issue since GPU utilization wouldn’t have been high enough to cause such a reaction. I then decided to test again with GPU fans off to see if the sound vanished. However, this only confirmed that if the noise was present when fans were on, it wasn't due to GPU whine.
Since the sound was limited to one game and didn’t recur even after adjusting settings, I considered other possibilities. I checked my latest NVIDIA driver and reinstalled it, opened Task Manager, and looked for resource usage. The only thing consuming GPU resources was my game. I also thought about ordering a replacement fan, which would take weeks.
Given these findings, I’m left wondering what to do next. My GPU model is a 3070. If you need more details, just let me know.
Adjust each fan individually to full speed, listening carefully with your ear one at a time until you pinpoint the source of the noise.
Process each case fan individually, then move on to all GPU fans because they’re hard to manage separately. Likely a case fan since the 3070 is still early in its life.
Coil hum matches coil whine but at a lower pitch, sounding like a grinding buzz. It appears on both my RVII and 2060 Super when certain loads are applied—only noticeable without headphones and when the vehicle is on water. With the stock fans, it wasn't clear because the RVII and Nvidia Turing FE coolers weren't very quiet.
I performed the task, and determined it's my GPU rather than a case fan.
It might be a faulty fan bearing. These usually produce noise only when the fan spins faster.
I adjusted my GPU fan to 70% maximum afterburner, which matched the speed it was running when the noise started. After ten seconds, I heard the sound for roughly ten seconds before it disappeared. Then I kept it running at that setting for ten minutes, and it stopped again.
Have you experimented with a quicker setting? Adjusting it precisely to the speed you initially noticed the problem, essentially opens the door for other factors to influence that threshold, preventing consistent detection. The simplest solution would be to boost the fan to full capacity.