The RTX 4070 can produce coil whine when overclocked, especially if it's pushed beyond its stable limits.
The RTX 4070 can produce coil whine when overclocked, especially if it's pushed beyond its stable limits.
I started diving into overclocking about two months ago, adjusting my GPU and pushing it until it ran smoothly at +200 cores and +1000 memory. Recently, while trying the Tomb Raider benchmark, the GPU began making noise. At first I assumed it was a case fan, but it was definitely the GPU itself. I reset everything to defaults, ran an AIDA64 stress test, and the sound disappeared or became much quieter. When I launched Tomb Raider, the issue returned, just like with RE4. It seems the problem only appears in-game rather than during stress tests. How could this happen? Was my card damaged?
Power consumption increases steadily with clock speed, and greater draw means a higher chance of coil whine. The issue seems to appear only in games because stress tests provide a consistent workload, whereas gaming involves fluctuating demands. Coil whine often rises and falls with frame rate changes, so reducing overclocking can lessen or eliminate it. Another possibility is that the problem has always existed but was previously unnoticed.