As the title states. I’m getting some pretty severe coil whine when doing certain things within the game. Currently I notice when I either open my character sheet, or when opening stash. Why is this happening? RTX 3080.
That means the card (GPU) or power supply (PSU) is making noise under load.
Go here:
https://geeks3d.com/furmark/downloads/
Download version 2.
Run it without making any changes to the settings. (use just Run, not the benchmark options)
Let it run for at least 10 minutes. See if you get coil whine with it. It should tax it hard enough to do so. This is to just confirm it. Another tool I know WILL produce coil whine is:
https://www.passmark.com/products/performancetest/download.php
This one causes my 4080 Super to squeal even. If this tool makes noise, then its the card or PSU that is the culprit, depending on where the noise is actually coming from.
But coil whine is a manufacturing defect. Always is, always will be. It has to do with coil quality, position on the board and power delivery to the circuit.
I have heard coil whine in various devices over the past decade, GPUs, PSUs, etc, when under heavy loads.
Its not the game’s fault your card can whine, but the manufacturer of the card.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that the vendor’s can cause a large uptick in power consumption with any graphics card. And stash or inventory open with a similar load.
Edit:
Just for giggles I ran the performance test again on mine, to see if there were any changes.
My system still fails in the 99th percentile for performance surprisingly, even though I built it last year and installed the 4080S this past January. Rating for the system came to 14,743.8:
https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=226108650017
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Out of curiosity, how come this is the only game I can hear it on, and only in those 2 very specific scenarios?
Secondly, ty for the diagnostic steps. I will give them a go later tonight or tomorrow and report back.
As I said near the end:
That essentially means that apparently this game is the only one taxing the card or PSU hard enough to cause it to make noise. But I am curious if either of those tests also cause you noise.
But I want you to keep this in mind:
The game is not going to hurt your hardware. No game can really do that, though many have claimed a game has. Usually what might happen is a particular game may tax a piece of hardware enough to reveal a weakness in its build quality. Which then means its a defective item to start with, but just hadn’t been pushed enough to fail prematurely. Gigabyte had a rather large rash of defective 3080s that were going bad about the time this very game was launching. If yours is among that group well… It could be that.
Or someone that has pushed the hardware past its design limits by over clocking or over voltaging their hardware to get more out of it and then it when it gets a real load it goes too far and lets out the magic smoke. 
Your hardware is built to protect itself from real damage, either by throttling the card’s power, shutting down, etc. If you are running into those issues at that point, its time to troubleshoot the hardware, clean the fans and heat sink, stuff like that. But its designed protection won’t help if the card has a flaw or is being over driven by custom driver settings.
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So I ran both tests, but this test is the only one of the two where I ever heard anything. It was only during one test. It was called “Quaternion Julia Fractals” Showed an FPS of 1872.9. However, the coil whine I heard hear was barely noticeable and no where near as loud as what I hear in D4.
Other than that, here are my results
CPU Mark - 39820.4 (94th Percentile)
2D Graphics Mark - 177.6 (11th Percentile) read that this result will be low if gsync is on, which mine is
3D Graphics Mark - 15920.2 (72nd Percentile)
Memory Mark - 3608.6 (91st Percentile)
Disk Mark - 46725.1 (96th Percentile)
PC hardware is
Ryzen 5900x
EVGA FTW3 3080
G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 CL16-19-19-39 1.35V 32GB (4x8GB)
NVME WD Black SN850 1TB
Thankfully that isn’t a thing for nVidia GPUs from Pascal onward as those are voltage locked and you can’t modify voltage up or down without doing a physical shunt mod.
Well, as I said earlier, coil whine can happen in many cards. 3080s were often found to produce it, across multiple manufacturers.
I get it.
You are trying to blame the game because its the only thing that is causing the noise.
Its not the game’s fault directly. Sure its putting a load on the card and the card is making noise because of its coil design/quality.
To be honest, there may be nothing to do about it, other than lower the graphic settings. Set a lower FPS cap, etc, just so it isn’t noisy. The card may continue to run fine otherwise though.
Or have the card sent in for repair but I suspect its out of warranty by this point.
Are you sure the noise is coming from the card or the power supply though? Because both can make that noise when a large enough power draw is applied.
I’m not trying to “blame” anything. I’m trying to understand why this is the only place it happens. It seems very strange to me that opening my character page, and opening my stash causes my gpu to be that heavily taxed.
Well, this has been an issue since the game launched.
In fact there were some players blaming those exact areas for causing their GPUs to die in July of 2023. When it fact they were running on Gigabyte 3080/3080Ti’s that had known manufacturing flaws and those flaws presented under a heavy enough load.
Those posts are probably still on the forum here. lol
Its not a hard stretch to think someone wants to blame the game for the issue though. I read it often enough.
Ultimately, it comes down to two things:
- Making adjustments to your settings to minimize the effect
- replacing the hardware making the noise
I run the same game you do, and have the settings maxed out with one exception. I have Ray Tracing shadows set to Low to keep my FPS at 100.
I’m running a 4080 Super though so has a bit more beef. But it makes no noise at all, heck even the fans don’t speed up much. But I have them set to run all the time, not on demand.
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