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Sadly, while on the topic of upgrades, I have to note that my system developed somewhat of a "coil whine" in the process. At first I thought it was something coming from the speakers, it’s an easy mistake to make, but I soon realized that the whining came from the PSU. While it’s thankfully barely noticeable it’s still driving me nuts. It only manifests at the desktop, when moving the mouse, while the computer is otherwise idle. I also think I can hear some low intermittent whining even when not moving the mouse. There is definitely something sour about the noise profile.
It seems a fair assumption that the noise isn’t just coming from the PSU but is in fact caused by the PSU. Now I have a fairly fancy Corsair 520 PSU that has been working well for years. So I don’t know. Maybe the sound was always there but masked by the tremendous noise of the old graphic card. Perhaps it’s something with this GPU (5850). Or perhaps, as hinted by the unofficial solution that Corsair offers on their forum, it has to do with power consumption.
Coil whine after all can happen in any number of ways but generally there are two scenarios that people mention on the net. The first being the idle whine, usually when moving the mouse or scrolling. The other being a load whine that kicks in when both the CPU and GPU start to draw power for instance during a 3D application. That is to say, there is usually a threshold you have to pass.
And going by the Corsair debate, and their somewhat silly idea to disable SpeedStep (to increase and stabilize power consumption I take it), this train of thought bring up the notion that getting a new leaner graphic card might have actually dropped the consumption to below the coil whine threshold. It’s all pure speculation of course. But even though I haven’t disabled SpeedStep, just running some application that brings the consumption from 105 to 140 W and beyond (where I was before the upgrade) changes the audio landscape completely. Running Furmark at 220 W I just cannot hear the whine anymore. Then again that also effectively exits SpeedStep so who knows what is the chicken and the egg here.
I don’t know what I’ll do about it. RMA is awkward, just think of the shipping charges for a PSU and not having a working unit for weeks perhaps. On the other hand it was hilariously expensive so I can’t tolerate even the smallest of blemishes. Seems it is still under warranty so it seems stupid to open it up and encase the capacitors in epoxy or whatever.
