Crowdsourcing An Investigation Into Coil Whine

If you’ve heard the high-pitched whine or buzz from an electronic device when a current-carrying inductor is vibrating, you’ll know how unpleasant it can be. It’s common in all kinds …. Crowdsourcing An Investigation Into Coil Whine.

It’s common in all kinds of equipment, but it’s become a particular annoyance of late in hardware like PC power supplies, GPUs, and cooling pumps. There is plenty of hearsay on the web about which parts whine and which don’t, and [Lowell Wood] wants to get to the bottom of it. To track the issue, [Lowell] has put together the Coil Whine Database.

It accepts user reports on hardware, regarding the level at which coil whine is present. A score of 0 is given to a part that is inaudible in a quiet room, with higher scores representing higher sound levels. A part scored at 2 is audible working at a desk with the computer under load; a part scored at 4 is audible even when the machine or device is at idle.

For now, the database is largely empty—[Lowell] has just opened submissions, adding a report on their own ROG Astral RTX 5080 card for good measure.