GPU Coil Whine | What is it & how to mitigate it.

What is coil whine?

Coil whine is a common issue characterized by a high-pitched noise caused by the vibration of coils inside electronic components such as graphics cards, power supplies and motherboards. These coils are responsible for regulating the flow of electricity within the component. While coil whine is generally considered normal, it can be annoying for some users. Different models of certain products can produce higher or lower levels of coil whine on average. Graphics cards are the main culprits in modern gaming PCs, particularly AMD Radeon cards, particularly the higher-end ones that operate at higher power limits and GPU frequency.

Most commonly effected cards

In recent and current generation cards, coil whine has been most commonly observed to be louder in AMD Radeon 69XX and 79XX series models. Nvidia RTX cards are not immune to the issue but typically are less severe / audable. On the Nvidia side, again it's the higher clocking cards that are most commonly effected like the RTX4070 Ti Super. Less so on the RTX 4080 and 4090 even though they are higher performing as their performance comes from additional cores, and not just pushing the same number of cores harder with higher clock speeds and voltages.

How to mitigate it?

Aside from just having a mostly enclosed chassis, keeping the side panel on and perhaps sitting the PC itself further away from where you sit at your desk, or below it, there are a couple of different methods to mitigating coil whine. We recommend trying both and spending a bit of time dialing in the numbers until you find what the best solution is for you and your setup.

Frame rate limiting

While more frames are generally considered better performance, if your monitor isn't capable of displaying them all, they are largely wasted. Most monitors operate at 60-144Hz, while very high-end monitors reach all the way to 240 and beyond. We recommend capping your in-game frames to the maximum refresh rate of your monitor. This will reduce the load on your GPU and in turn reduce the power draw and coil whine. If you're running a 60Hz monitor, we recommend capping your frame rates to 120Hz to maintain minimal input latency for fast-paced action games where milliseconds matter!
Many games have built-in methods of capping frame rates, but if you are playing a game that doesn't, you can use features in the driver software of your GPU to cap the frame rate. For Nvidia cards, this is called 'Max Frame Rate' and can be found in the Nvidia Control Panel. For AMD cards, this is called 'Radeon Chill' and can be found in the Adrenalin software package under the Gaming tab.

Undervolting

Slightly undervolting the GPU is a common method, but going too far in this direction can reduce system stability. A light undervolt can improve temperatures and in turn performance while reducing power draw and coil whine at the same time. AMD Radeon cards are the most common cards to experience high levels of coil whine, luckily, they are also reasonably easy to undervolt, and the Adrenalin software package that comes with the latest AMD driver bundle even has a one-click automatic undervolting tuning button. Simply open the Adrenalin software, navigate to the performance tab, and click the tuning button. Here you will find a button called 'Undervolt GPU' under the Tuning Control settings.

Dialing down a GPU overclock

If you have overclocked your card or purchased a model that is agressively overclocked out of the box, dialing back clock speeds and power limits can also help reduce coil whine. Every model is different. We suggest starting with very small steps, lowering max clock speeds until you find the right balance for you. For Nvidia cards, clock speeds can be adjusted in Afterburner (developed by MSI) and for AMD cards, you can again use the AMD Adrenalin software package. You'll find the settings under the performance tab and plenty of videos and guides online discussing how everything works. Be careful playing with these settings as they can easily create system instability if you get them out of balance. That being said, if you do stumble into an unstable configuration you can always reset defaults to get back to square one.

Is it considered normal?

The short answer is yes. Coil whine is a common issue that can occur in any electronic component that uses coils. It is not a fault or defect in the product, but rather a side effect of the way the component is designed and operates. While coil whine can be annoying, it does not affect the performance or reliability of the product. That being said, what is normal for one model or brand is not necessarily normal for another. Do a bit of homework and check out online reviews before making a purchase. If you are concerned about coil whine and want a system as quiet as possible, we strongly recommend going with an Nvidia solution. At least this is the case today at the time this article was written. If coil whine doesn't bother you, the RX 7XXX series are great value for money on the performance side, but if you want to avoid coil whine as much as possible, it's probably best you avoid the RX 79XX cards in particular.

Examples

Below are some examples of coil whine from current and recent generation GPUs.
Example One : 7900 XT (Youtube link) - Courtesy of Techtesters Dec 22.
Example Two : Several Previous Gen Cards (Youtube link) - Courtesy of optimum May 21.
Example Three : 7900XTX (Youtube link) - Courtesy of KitGuruTech May 23.

Exceptions where it might be warrantable

Particularly bad cases of coil whine can occur and when they do, they may be accepted by the manufacturer for warranty replacement. The bar at which this line is crossed is generally at the discretion of the manufacturer and evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For Nvidia cards, cases of bad coil whine in relatively new cards in our experience can be replaced under warranty. For AMD Radeon cards however, particularly RX79XX models like the 7900XT ,XTX and GRE, the manufacturers do not accept them back nor replace them as nearly as often as the higher levels of coil whine are generally considered normal for these particular models. This makes the bar much higher for determining what is and isn't a particularly bad case. If you think you might have a particularly bad case of coil whine, the best place to start is reaching out to the manufacturer's customer support team by email (MSI, Sapphire, Gigabyte, Asus, etc.) and asking them for advice on how to proceed. If they recommend a warranty return, provide the email to the retailer when you apply for RMA to help expedite the process.