Motherboard Coil Whine !!!! For the love of God, help me!!!

[kiiroaka]

* Windows is quiet, OSX is not - same exact hardware.

Then it's "simply" a matter of OSX settings, no? What happens if you use a different Mac ID? If there is no change then you may have to look at the BIOS settings. On my Mobo I can set the CPU speed the same for all cores, for example. You may want to try the opposite of whatever it is now set to. Or it could be that you have Intel Speed Step enabled or disabled. You may want to try the opposite of whatever it is now set to. I disabled Speed Step.

If you have the BIOS C-States enabled, what happens if you disable all of them?

Lastly, are you over clocking your CPU?

 

[sabotage3d]

I have the same issue no noise under Windows 10 but coil whining amplified by the mouse movement on Sierra. Did you solve it?

 

[lemjello]

I had this issue with a build. It was driving me nutts. My solution was insanely simple. I used a ground lift adapter on the computer power. Noise went away.

 

[sabotage3d]

Well as we don't have problems under Windows 10 I wonder what Sierra is doing differently.

 

[pastrychef]

I had this issue with a build. It was driving me nutts. My solution was insanely simple. I used a ground lift adapter on the computer power. Noise went away.

You mean something like this?

 

[sabotage3d]

This looks dangerous.

 

[ghorwith]

Likely one of the coils or capacitors on the motherboard (perhaps near the cpu). You might what to use a straw attached to a cup to make a "stethoscope" to pinpoint where the whine is coming from. However, this may be academic since there's not much you can do about it (unless you feel competent and brave enough to use a soldering iron on surface mounted components on a multilayered board). Chances are, you only experience this with OS X because it may be calling for higher voltages with increased cpu load.

 

[kiiroaka]

Chances are, you only experience this with OS X because it may be calling for higher voltages with increased cpu load.

Reminds me of plasma HDTVs "singing" when the brightness is turned up too high. Turn down the brightness so that the black bars of a picture turn black from gray and the noise goes away. Same thing happened to some guys who were over driving 350W back up power supplies when they were trying to protect 700W PSUs.

In the case of a PC it probably is a matter of getting a better built higher wattage PSU. Haswell Certified, of course. Some PSUs have separate +12V rails, for instance. What does a CPU use? +12V, of course.

 

[whiplashtony]

Hello again,

I thought I would pass along another update ...

I binged drinked away my noisy computer troubles with a couple bottles of whiskey over the holidays, and just through force of will I came to terms with issue. I generally play music when I work or play on the computer, so the issue is something I adapted too.

That said I did come across an important clue. I had a messy upgrade to 10.12.1, and I moved from a single SSD to a RAID 0 array of 3 m.2 ultras - https://www.dropbox.com/s/wqk7sq2y3hqmdaz/Screenshot 2017-02-08 16.12.07.png?dl=0.

In doing so I pretty much had to reinstall Sierra, and when I downloaded my mouse driver for a Razer Mamba 2012 there was a setting for polling rate that I played around with when I was correcting mouse acceleration - https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjoxgy8slhnpjxx/Screenshot 2017-02-08 16.13.27.png?dl=0. Basically in dropping the polling rate down to the minimum 125 (from default 1000?) many of the mouse movement related issues were mitigated.

One of the things I did to isolate where the coil noise was coming from was to rapidly move the mouse back and forth, and the pointer would be directly correlated with the coil whine. Basically it would peak when I moved the mouse in this fashion, the noise was at it's loudest, and I could detect the coil whine coming from the CPU area. With the mouse exacerbating the issue greatly, this setting change has helped a lot.

Another thing I have noticed is that I pretty much have to reboot my computer once a day, because the mouse will lock up after the computer goes idle or it hasn't been in use overnight. I'm not quite sure why. I did have the "Enable power Nap" setting enabled, but I turned it off today to monitor with this being one of the last issues I'm slowing resolving for my Hackintosh. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xc5rctxqky724i2/Screenshot 2017-02-08 16.24.52.png?dl=0

I always guessed it had something to do with USB drivers, 2D acceleration, and how Sierra was handling CPU throttling (intel speed settings, overclocking, etc) in combination with this board / cpu specifically.

Also, and for the last time - this can NOT have anything to do with the hardware or grounding. This issue is not even noticeable on Windows 10 on the same exact hardware. Also I have another PC build with the SAME cpu and SAME motherboard, and a 1600 watt plat psu - when I used the exact SSD from my other build on this box - the same exact coil noise sound existed. I explained previous, I can hear the same issue on Windows 10 in the same area but I really had to strain with my ear right next to the board. This issue is 100x worse on my Sierra/Hackintosh build. It has to be software or driver based. It's either clover CPU / Sierra issues, or USB driver issues for this particular motherboard period.

 

[whiplashtony]

Then it's "simply" a matter of OSX settings, no? What happens if you use a different Mac ID? If there is no change then you may have to look at the BIOS settings. On my Mobo I can set the CPU speed the same for all cores, for example. You may want to try the opposite of whatever it is now set to. Or it could be that you have Intel Speed Step enabled or disabled. You may want to try the opposite of whatever it is now set to. I disabled Speed Step.

If you have the BIOS C-States enabled, what happens if you disable all of them?

Lastly, are you over clocking your CPU?

I've done everything. 10 different variations of overclocking, every possible motherboard option for CPU settings, SSDT clover settings, force CPU frequency, etc. I've also stated before when I use crypto currency mining to keep the CPU maxed at 100% the coil whine is completely gone. It's a matter of how Sierra is handling low voltage / frequency states.