One Gigabyte Radeon HD 4850 Silent Cell. The whine is very faint, barely audible from up close in my old rig during startup and high-FPS 3D rendering, but clearly there.

One Intel SSD 320 (120 GB version). Unlike with the HD 4850, I can't correlate this whining with the device's activity. It's on and off seemingly random. It's high enough to be muffled well by felt dampening material around a hard disk cage. Without dampening, it is annoying at night.

I have 3 IPS 2365wb that whine, the middle just started

Fujitsu ESPRIMOVIEW B24W-5 ECO 24" monitor

Makes an awfully annoying whining sound when brightness is < 92%. The whine can be heard across the room. Totally unacceptable. Returned the first one because of this, was given a replacement that had the same high pitched noise. Wanted to return the replacement and get my money back, was denied because by Fujitsu standards this noise was normal.

Asus P8h67I whines constantly. Do not buy

Everyone, I have just found a very helpful step which removed my whining from the motherboard! Try it:



Its all very weird, but this stopped the (capacitors, I think) sound:

1. Execute: "regedit"
2 .Locate: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ PowerSettings \ 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b¬740d00 \ 5d76a2ca-e8c0-402f-a133-215849¬2d58ad
3. Change Attributes from 1 to 0.
4. Then, through the control panel - power - in the settings mode select power management processor. There will be an option disabling idle processor and high pitched noise immediately disappears.

Taken from this thread:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/292 ... oming-area

The trouble with this solution is that it significantly increases the power demand of the CPU at idle. Minimize-power-at-idle features in both Intel & AMD processors get turned off. The CPU's idle temperature goes up, along with the power draw. It may be a good solution if nothing else works and you have no return/exchange option.

Shuttle XPC DS61. The motherboard in this thing is LOUD. Initially I thought the test hard-drive I was using was broken (Seagate Momentus 7200.4 250GB). Swapped the Seagate for a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD, and confirmed the board in this machine is horrendously loud.

Shuttle are correct when they say the supplied cooler is quiet. Shame the coils on the board totally drown out the noise of the two 50mm fans, and even the noise of a 7200rpm Seagate from 2010.

Test system: Shuttle DS61 v1.0, 1x4GB Crucial DDR3-1066 SODIMM, Intel Celeron G540 Sandy Bridge, Crucial M4 64GB mSATA SSD.

These hi-pitched noise are usually from coils. I battled then on DFI LP B mobo so badly, that I poured silicone on the coils. But no help. After the mobo capacitor exploded and mobo stoped working I realized, that the Bad Caps (tm) plague is behind this noise. The bad caps lose their characteristic, forcing the regulation chips oscilate wildly, causing this noise.
Replace bad caps and problem will go away like breeze.

In fact, the disabling of the power saving mode on CPU confirm that. The problem is the CPU VRM phase, witch is getting bad by the bad caps. Don't get fooled, tough. There are only like 5 companies that make quality caps (Rubycon, Nichicon, Samxon, Panasonic, some Hitachi big caps models, Elna for audio and that practically it is... some rate Chemicons as good caps, I tendt to disagree) and there are plenty of fakes. Polymers included and yes, they fail too. Why the hell you think they (the polymers) are rated at 2000 hours too? Never trust Elite Taiwan polymers or such "hot shots."
Even respectable manufactores using KNOWN fake caps. Apple too.

Once they use golden letters Nichicon HM caps ROFL!
(this is, of course, only a joke for capacitor gurus... only one Nichicon caps come with golden leters - HZ ones, the best elyte caps in the world, the Samxon GA are par-to-par with them... so Nichicon HM caps with gold letters are clear fake spoted on first sight, no need to talk later... and sure enough, the bulge and machine whine... till death)

So, whining coils means - beware, I have bad caps inside and I'm about to give up!

Thanks for the insight and input about caps - and the fun story!

I was hoping my display's whine was caused by something like bad caps so it would blow up and I could buy a better one... 6 years later no luck. Similar experience with my whining, once-exchanged Seasonic PSU (S12II-430) and some power bricks (adapters), still going strong and whining. The only thing that has had caps blow up have been two Antec PSUs from their early days (Sonata I & II PSUs), and they funnily enough didn't whine before giving up the ghost.