Dear Nikolaj,

Thank you for taking the time to leave us feedback regarding your most recent experience with PCSpecialist.

After reviewing the email chain with my colleague Tove I can see that there have been several back-and-forths regarding the coil whine and I am hoping I can address your concerns here.

I can confirm that my colleague's responses to you are correct, and that coil whine is a “side effect” if you will with computers, and to explain this better, I will use full transparency here with the hopes that this may also help other customers who may also be encountering something similar.

A coil whine doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is wrong with your hardware. While the sound is emitting from your hardware, it is a vibration from having a large amount of power going through them, this doesn’t mean anything is coming dislodged or being damaged. It is for example in the same manner in which a Fridge can often give off a light Humming noise. If you have a fairly powerful GPU, and/or are running fairly old games or both, you may be running games at extremely high framerates without realizing it, and you don’t have in-game FPS caps or V-Sync enabled, you’ll most likely be running games at unlocked, uneven framerates that can result in screen tearing, especially if the framerate exceeds refresh rate.

Other variables include If your monitor refresh rate is at 60 Hz, we would recommend to set a 60 FPS cap in NVIDIA Experience or in your game, if the game supports FPS caps, V-Sync is an option too but can introduce some latency that an FPS cap by itself does not. If your monitor refresh rate is at 120 Hz, 144 Hz, 240 Hz, or another high refresh rate, this can also increase the chances of Coil whine emanating from the PC.

In the case of 240 Hz gaming and higher, you may still need to cap at 144 Hz or lower to significantly reduce coil whine. The amount of leeway you leave between your FPS cap and refresh rate depends on the monitor you have and the GPU you have. Another variable is If you’ve been overclocking your graphics card and are experiencing coil whine after, disabling your overclock is one of the first things you should do to fix the issue. If doing so works, you may still be able to overclock your graphics card- just try to tweak it more carefully, and especially reduce voltage as much as you can. In most cases, though, a GPU overclock causing coil whine is an issue best solved by simply not overclocking.

As you can see, many instances can cause this to occur and for the most part, this is not classed as a fault, even Most Manufacturers themselves will reject an RMA for Coil whine unless it is an extreme circumstance, and even then it would be subject to the RMA team and their assessment of the noise and other factors.

We had originally looked to do this as a Goodwill Gesture in the hopes that this would have perhaps decreased or in an ideal world stopped this from happening further, Sadly however it is still present and given these events we are no longer in a position to offer any additional support with the Coil Whine, you are still however fully entitled to support should the card have an actual fault.

Whilst I fully appreciate how frustrating this must be, and genuinely wish there was more we could look to offer in regards to a solution, we have attempted to look to do this positively and have gone above and beyond of what other companies may have done, I would even invite you to perhaps contact the Manufacturer directly and they WILL confirm their stance of policy regarding coil whine. They may also be able to provide further support or recommendations on how to reduce it at the very least.

Many Thanks,
Chris H
PCSpecialist Support Team