MSI Urges You To Overclock Your Graphics To Reduce Coil Whine.
Contents
The Coil Whine is a phenomenon that happens -too- frequently in graphics cards, especially in high-end ones, and consists in that when we subject the GPU to a high stress, it emits an unpleasant sound that, although it is practically innocuous , it gets quite annoying. It’s exactly what is happening to me with an MSI graphics card, and after opening a support ticket to ask, their response left me in shock: they urge me to Overclock the GPU.
As you probably already know if you usually read the component reviews that I frequently do, I am a brand new owner of an MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X, a high-end graphics card that, all told, costs around 800 euros and from which, therefore, only the best can be expected. Unfortunately, regarding the coil whine issue, it’s almost a lottery, and I had to suffer its effects from the beginning, when I acquired the graphic in May of last year, although in a fairly mild way.
However, for a couple of weeks the Coil Whine has increased its intensity (and I don’t know the reason) and it’s already becoming very annoying, so I decided to open a support ticket directly with the manufacturer to see if they could help me. Could you give any recommendations in this regard, including of course the possibility of managing an RMA so that I can change the graphics card for another since, I consider, although it is accepted that the Coil Whine is not a failure, it is something that a graphics card of this type should not have. price.
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MSI responds to OC the graphics to alleviate the Coil Whine
So, I went to the MSI website, where I was previously registered and where I already had my graphics card registered (precisely in case I had to use the warranty at some point), but before requesting an RMA directly I decided first talk to technical support, to see if they could help me in any way. This is the text I wrote for you (unfortunately, MSI only supports English so it’s in English):
And in less than 24 hours, the technical support answered me the following:
The truth is that I have been left in pictures. Already in the past we told you some tricks to reduce the Coil Whine in the graphics card, but among these we never considered the possibility of Overclocking the graphics card as a possible solution to the Coil Whine problem. In addition, you already know that although OCing a graphics card does not void its guarantee, it is a process that can be dangerous and that, although it is difficult if we do not have a little caution and moderation when doing it, it could end with the premature death of our device.
How to Overclock the Graphics Card
From MSI’s response, I seriously doubt that the problem is my power supply, since it has plenty of power and quality too (it’s a Corsair RM1000i) in addition to the fact that, as I indicated in my initial message, I had already tested the graphics card on another computer (in this case with a 800 watt Silverstone Strider Titanium ST80F-TI) with the same result.
So, if MSI says that Overclocking the graphics card can help reduce Coil Whine on it, then we are going to test it to see if it is true or not. For this, how could it be otherwise, I have used its own tool, MSI Afterburner. Initially, I tried just raising the speed of the Core in steps of 50 by 50 Mhz, up to a total of +300 Mhz without any improvement (yes, the graphics is totally stable even without raising the voltage).
After the failure raising only the speed of the Core, I decided to return the graphics to its default values and try to Overvolt, as suggested by the manufacturer. Initially I raised the voltage in steps of 10 by 10 mV, but not before raising the Power Limit of the graph to the maximum so that it doesn’t give me problems due to consumption. Raising the voltage little by little, I did begin to notice some improvement, but I did not dare to increase more than +50% when I saw that, in my case, the temperatures (and the noise of the fans) began to reach levels I didn’t like them at all (I’m not very given to OCing the graphics, really).
In a combination of everything (and yes, with the graph completely stable) the result was the same.
Conclusion: Overvolt the graph does reduce the Coil Whine
Finally, the conclusion that I have been able to draw from this test is that, although Overclocking the graph has not served to reduce the effects of the hateful Coil Whine, Overvolting its core has helped a bit, although not to eliminate it. altogether. Of course, let’s not fool ourselves, Overvolting the graphics card can reduce its life expectancy, the GPU will generate more heat (and therefore the fans will make more noise) and in general it is only advisable to do it if we want to Overclock it or, if this is our case, we want to mitigate the effects of electrical noise emitted by some graphics cards.
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