Why does DW make my video card squeal?

[zma]

Originally Posted by LuftWolf

Sorry, that's too funny the way you described it... :rotfl:

It wasn't the least bit funny when it happened, trust me! But I recovered from the trauma quite quickly. And as Neil Young put it, "It's better to burn out than to fade away".

My old card was a PNY, and, judging from the price of it, the components are/were probably not of the highest quality. (I now have an MSI card. What is it about the three-letter acronyms, anyway?!)

I looked around on a couple of hardware-related forums. This is what I found at [H]ard|OCP: Weird noise from my 7800 GTX 512MB. Quoting one of the replys:

Originally Posted by 101

I can hear a faint squeal from my 512s when they load data if I have my ear near them. It is extremely high pitched and nothing at all to do with the cooler. My guess would be strain on the power supply circuitry when there are massive amounts of IO on the card. Such as loading texture data at the beginning of a level. Might be a little feedback at audible frequencies generated in the electrolytics used in the PWM regulation.

If it's really loud it could be a bad cap that is exaggerating the effect and might want to consider an RMA. It's doubtful it would get any louder/worse in the relatively short time period you would own the card (short compared to how long it takes caps to age). You could try very lightly pressing on various electrolytic caps (tall silver cans) with a q-tip while you hear the noise, particularly the one by the SLI connector since it is so far away from the rest of the power supply. It also could be a poorly potted wire wound inductor, of which there is only one on the board in front of the PCI-E power connector (big black box slightly shorter than the silver cans).

I think I'll try that q-tip thing. Hopefully there'll be no fireworks. I'll have to test with a couple of other games as well, although 3Dmark05 seems to run "squeal-free".