CX 750M buzzing

[Dragolax]

I have a new CX 750M in a newly built system around just a month old where I have found that when playing certain games that the PSU would start making a loud buzzing sound. This seems to happen when playing games like World of Warcraft mainly in the character select screen and world of tanks in a similar manner but when playing the game usually it doesn't seem to do anything and not sure what the cause of this is.

[Croak]

That's coil whine, and that's typical of many power supplies and/or video cards, especially in high-performance systems.

 

In character select screens and other UI overlays that use a lot of 2D elements or older games with simpler geometry and textures, the GPU can render things very quickly. And when in 3D mode, the GPU likes to do as much rendering as it can, that's its entire reason for being.

 

So, the FPS goes through the roof because it's such a simple scene, the GPU is working like crazy trying to render all those really easy frames, it asks for more power from the motherboard, the motherboard pulls it from the PSU, and the voltage regulation circuitry on all involved components gets a workout. So the actual whine may be coming from your PSU, your GPU, or your motherboard, or even all three at once.

 

Turning on Vsync (or Frame Rate Target if you have a Kepler GPU) will help a lot with this, it'll let the GPU take a breather since you're putting a cap on the maximum frames per second.

 

Even with Vsync off, it's usually nothing dangerous, just annoying, and really no way to avoid it, even with the best components it's likely to happen.

 

My system with a CM750, P8P67 Pro, 2600K and HD6950's did it, and my current new system with an AX860i, Maximus V Extreme, 3570K and GTX 770 video cards does it too, though a bit less loudly.