I can hear my computer think

Hardware and technical stuff
1

One of the worst things about PCs are fan noise. The PC I picked up a while ago made a horrific rattle - bad fan. Fixing that though, I can literally hear my video card spin whenever I do something graphically intensive. Like when I zoom in or move the camera, the fan noise changes. When I drop to a menu, the fan cuts out. If I hit the windows key and drop to desktop, the fan noise stops on a dime. It’s basically tracking my mouse almost 1:1. It drives me batty!

Is this usual for PC gamers? Do ya’lls PC perfectly track your activity to your fan noise?

2

Can you not use Afterburner or something like that to set a custom fan profile?

3

I mean normally that’s what you do if it’s just a hair dryer. Here it has something to do with activity, which is super weird and annoying.

4

Is it a laptop? Sounds like you must be really close to it!

5

It’s an external video card in an enclosure.

6

No, but that’s because I pay a pretty penny for my cases. I look for ones with good airflow plus noise dampening.

I haven’t heard about the quality of these though when it comes to noise.

7

It’s not that weird. Activity means higher temperatures, which means higher fan speed, which means more noise.

8

I use Afterburner to ramp up my GPU fans in discrete steps, and set a 5-degree threshold to drop back down. So if I have the fan profile set to ramp up a notch at 60 degrees, then the fan speed won’t drop back down until it hits 55 degrees.

edit: Looking at my PC now, the feature is called ‘temperature hysteresis.’ Mine is set to 7 degrees, not 5.

9

I remember being able to hear the crunchy hard drive access and coil whine whenever there was any access or processing done from my first computer to a few computers later. This only went away in the last decade.

10

Taken it apart and given it a good clean right? I have to clean fans and heatsinks etc once a year or so. I think airflow wasnt right at some point and i could hear it more often but my last clean sorted it loads.

11

I had a computer where, if you didn’t mute the audio inputs, you could hear static through the speakers that tracked when you scrolled up and down.

12

Same. I went with a Fractal Design silent case on this last PC build. Makes all the difference in the world.

13

My new brand of choice as well. I never used them before but I went to an Antec Solo which was quiet, to a Cooler Master which was not, to Fractal Design and man, I just love working in a Fractal Design case. It just felt, I don’t know different, but it is also pretty quiet. Next time around I might spend just a bit more since I feel more confident with the brand now.

14

Can you choose the video card and is it very big? You can get a really quiet ASUS or MSI card. Their high end custom-coolers models are incredibly quiet.

15

Like Rei says, are you sure it’s not coil whine? I have a Dell XPS laptop that would make noises depending on what was showing on the screen (white background for example) after many years it was fixed after newer video/realtek drivers.

16

You know I think it is coil whine. It sometimes happen in desktop as well. It sounds more like high pitched rattle, which is why I thought it was the fan.

17

Sometimes games with uncapped frame rates can exacerbate coil whine. Try enabling vsync or using a 3rd-party app to limit the FPS.

18

Before integrated audio got better shielding, I could hear activity unless I used discrete sound.

19

Good idea, pick up a $7 usb sound card.