CPU chirping sound

Hellbeard

New member
Hi everyone.
I have an annoying sound coming from my cpu area. At least I think it’s the cpu. It’s only present when idle and disappears as soon as I put any load on the cpu. I have disabled all c-states (c1e, c3 and c6/c7) and cpu EIST but it won’t go away. I have also done some overclocking but at 4,4 GHz on 1,210 Vcore it’s still there.


System is:
Gigabyte X99 G1 wifi
Intel 5820k
HyperX Predator 3000MHz (currently running stock 2133MHz while I dial in my overclock (3000MHz because it was on sale and cost the same as 2133MHz))
Corsair H100i with Noctua nff12 with fan speed reducers
2x EVGA GTX 980 SC in Sli
Corsair RM 850W
3x Samsung 850 Evo 256GB Raid 0


Anybody got any theories or advice as to what is making this annoying chirping sound? It’s almost like a tiny electrical bird is hiding I’m my computer. I can live with it because I can only hear it when it’s fairly quiet in the room but I know it’s there and it will forever bug me.
 
Are you sure it's not either motherboard coil whine or maybe the pump on the H100i? Does it spin slower in idle and what happens if you let the pump spin full speed while the CPU is still idling?

I just can't ever imagine a CPU making noise.
 
Are you sure it's not either motherboard coil whine or maybe the pump on the H100i? Does it spin slower in idle and what happens if you let the pump spin full speed while the CPU is still idling?

The pump is running of the powersupply on full always so I don’t see it being the problem. It may be motherboard but I thought coil whine was because high amps made the coils vibrate and produce the noise associated with coil whine. The chirping noise I get only comes when the system is idling.
 
Sounds like either motherboard coil whine or PSU coil whine to me.

Just recently the overclock on my CPU was failing to post. The PC kept on resetting itself at boot. If I got in? everything was fine, but it annoyed me enough to put the PC back to stock clocks.

Thing is, now I have coil whine. It's very, very mild and only happens when the PC is booting but I have a feeling the power phases on my board have gone bad due to the really high clocks I had. It shouldn't ever happen on a board as ridiculously over engineered as this (20 phases IIRC all military grade) but something is amiss.

From what I hear about Gigabyte boards of late the power phases are utter poo. Mine's an MSI though...
 
Come to think of it, it sounds like HDD activity but I don’t have any HDD in my system.


The sound was present before I overclocked. The reason I overclocked my system was actually to see if it could eliminate the sound by having a higher idle power draw as it disappears the moment it gets nearly any load.



As for where it originates it’s definitely from around the cpu area not the psu..
 
Yeah sounds like the power phases.

Working of the theory that the power phases are to blame I did some digging in the bios and discovered that if I sett Load Line Calibration manually to high (3 from the top setting), and power phase PWM control to high performance (again 3 from the top setting), and disabled synthetic load (a load applied to help the PSU not fail when load is minimal), the result was that the noise disappeared. When I say disappeared I mean it’s so low it may very well be imaginary.

I haven’t tried it when the system isn’t overclocked but I’m currently running a 4,2GHz overclock with offset voltage of +0.075v Vcore and I don’t get any noise when it’s idling and Vcore drops to about 0,840v.
 
Ah yeah upping the LLC will definitely put a big strain on the phases.

Glad you sort of have it all sorted out though :)
 
Just remember 'auto' doesnt mean stock so your bios could be massively over volting stuff

as for the board brand etc Im staying out of it :p
 
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