Coil whine for a $649 graphics card is unacceptable. I am going to rip into BOTH red and green teams here, especially because they are supposed to be "flagship" level cards.
Green example:
Gigabyte and their 980Ti G1 Gaming cards. Friend ended up RMAing his Gigabyte twice for coil whine before giving up and buying a MSI Gaming 980 Ti instead. Read Newegg reviews. He's not alone. It's also not isolated to Gigabyte. Other 980 Tis from different AIBs have the same issue. For a $649+ card!
Red example:
Fury Nano coil whine
Are you kidding me? $649 card, and you skimp on the components and/or QC?
Honorable mention:
Cooler Master and the miserable job they did with the initial batch of Fury X pumps.
Common thread:
Chinese manufacturing and QC. You get what you pay for.
Seems they should have focused more on quality testing than who get the samples:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1573423/...high-pitch-noise-poor-quality-components-used
Add Guru3D to the list.
Not in the market for SFF PCs, but why should it be a desirable quality to remove the only drive cage out of one of these cases? Personally I'd rather pick a weaker GPU if that meant I could have several TB of cheap HDD space.
However, I would have no issues with an mATX case in my living room (Define Mini), so there's that.
Since you're not in this market, it's understandable that you may believe that users want to use cheap HDD space in the SFF PC.
But they don't. Many users are using things like intel NUC's or other SFF PCs with only a small OS drive, and then storing everything on a NAS, or whatever they are using.
My "HTPC" (no SFF case for me because at the time, there was no device like Nano even out so it wasn't an option for me to go SFF and get the performance I wanted), has 250 GB of space.
Nothing else in it. All drivebays removed, etc. and head over to Kodi.TV for examples of people using a NAS + HTPC solution and I'm sure some members here use it too.
How do you fix the blemish of having loud cards? You fail Q/C and send out noisy cards.
With the fiasco of the Fury X you'd almost be assured AMD would not let it repeat. Again, who is testing their products? Are they testing them in a different room?
Seems Fury is still the cream of the crop. Sapphire should get a medal for their product.
EDIT: How did TweakTown get a card? I'd figured probably BOTH sides would have black listed them by now.
Yerp. I got a giant Corsair Graphite 780T and I removed pretty much all the bays. Only using the rear SSD mounting points. Great for air flow and a cleaner view inside (since this case has a lovely giant window).
http://techreport.com/news/29011/updated-amd-vp-explains-nano-exclusion-apologizes
"I just received a very nice phone call from AMD's Roy Taylor. He apologized for his earlier comments on Twitter and says he doesn't think The Tech Report's reviews are unfair. He seems like a decent guy with perhaps a too-strong personality, and I can relate to that. So all is forgiven from my point of view."
So, care to answer why AMD themselves are now claiming they don't think TR is biased?
Well, maybe it's just my past experience here, when I tried such a setup (a couple of years ago) I found the speed and general handling of such a combination to be not that great. And browsing through ATs latest consumer NAS boxes makes me think that not that much has changed, with them crawling around 50 MB/s when it could just as well be 120 MB/s with the HTPC being your NAS with built in drives.Since you're not in this market, it's understandable that you may believe that users want to use cheap HDD space in the SFF PC.
But they don't. Many users are using things like intel NUC's or other SFF PCs with only a small OS drive, and then storing everything on a NAS, or whatever they are using.
My "HTPC" (no SFF case for me because at the time, there was no device like Nano even out so it wasn't an option for me to go SFF and get the performance I wanted), has 250 GB of space.
Nothing else in it. All drivebays removed, etc. and head over to Kodi.TV for examples of people using a NAS + HTPC solution and I'm sure some members here use it too.
Coil whine is a weird thing. It happens to almost every card. It really isn't an AMD or Nvidia thing. I think it's the nature of high end GPUs. I had a GTX 980 that whines. The 780Ti before it whines. The 290x in my other system whines. Heck, even the Titan X I'm currently using whines. Fortunately, for the most part, it seems to whine loudest under super high FPS (3DMark).
The only card where it was unbearably loud was my former Evga GTX 780TI. That thing had to go (and did went). The other cards whined but weren't really too noticeable during gaming unless all you do is focus on the whine instead of gaming.
Having said that, it would be nice if more vendors take their time to eliminate this problem. That should be the next point of focus because cards are so quiet nowadays that coil whine actually overpowers fan noise.
How do you fix the blemish of having loud cards? You fail Q/C and send out noisy cards.
With the fiasco of the Fury X you'd almost be assured AMD would not let it repeat. Again, who is testing their products? Are they testing them in a different room?
Seems Fury is still the cream of the crop. Sapphire should get a medal for their product.
EDIT: How did TweakTown get a card? I'd figured probably BOTH sides would have black listed them by now.
Common thread:
Chinese manufacturing and QC. You get what you pay for.
How do you fix the blemish of having loud cards? You fail Q/C and send out noisy cards.
With the fiasco of the Fury X you'd almost be assured AMD would not let it repeat. Again, who is testing their products? Are they testing them in a different room?
Seems Fury is still the cream of the crop. Sapphire should get a medal for their product.
EDIT: How did TweakTown get a card? I'd figured probably BOTH sides would have black listed them by now.
Noticed AMD Roy's twitter account has been deleted. Maybe he's been told to lay low?
Coil whine is a weird thing. It happens to almost every card. It really isn't an AMD or Nvidia thing. I think it's the nature of high end GPUs. I had a GTX 980 that whines. The 780Ti before it whines. The 290x in my other system whines. Heck, even the Titan X I'm currently using whines. Fortunately, for the most part, it seems to whine loudest under super high FPS (3DMark).
The only card where it was unbearably loud was my former Evga GTX 780TI. That thing had to go (and did went). The other cards whined but weren't really too noticeable during gaming unless all you do is focus on the whine instead of gaming.
Having said that, it would be nice if more vendors take their time to eliminate this problem. That should be the next point of focus because cards are so quiet nowadays that coil whine actually overpowers fan noise.
once someone figure out how to make sure those caps etc..wont oscillate to create it then yes
Sapphire cooling has truly impressed me. I won't be surprised if the next card I get is again a Sapphire card.
They are based in Taiwan, and apparently very well connected. When nVidia did try and cut them off (for whatever reason) they were still able to get cards ahead of launch and were releasing reviews ~12 hours ahead of NDA. Since they had never signed an NDA there was nothing nVidia could do to them and they couldn't cut off their supply.
The problem is already solved. Its just a cost/profit issue. Cheaper=more profit.
Well, maybe it's just my past experience here, when I tried such a setup (a couple of years ago) I found the speed and general handling of such a combination to be not that great. And browsing through ATs latest consumer NAS boxes makes me think that not that much has changed, with them crawling around 50 MB/s when it could just as well be 120 MB/s with the HTPC being your NAS with built in drives.
I think, while what you do is a viable way to set up a HTPC, it's also that, well, setup hurdle that keeps HTPCs from wider adoption. Because my impression is that "Many users are using things like intel NUC's or other SFF PCs with only a small OS drive" really isn't as many people as us regulars in tech forums think.
Seems to really depend on where you look at then. I do see quite a few people happily adopting cloud storage into their lives, but at the same time I have yet to see one [who isn't a techie] who hosts his own cloud storage through a NAS. I do have to add though that upload speeds in germany are usually ranging from bad to atrocious, so that's a major factor as well. Onedrive will easily saturate your mobile download (in my case: 17 mbit/s), your own upload from DSL will not (in my case: 2 Mbit/s).But many many many people are happy their NAS and recommend them. ...
Is it the norm? Of course not, many people are holding on to very very old setups. Is it the future? Yes, and it's being pushed more and more. Portable wireless HDDs that you never have to take out of your travel bag for use with your ultra slim laptop, or use with a tablet, or a phone. People are starting to realize there are benefits in keeping your storage medium separate from your actual device. This is why Cloud Storage is taking off and you're limited by the speed of your INTERNET connection in that case. Yet people still are purchasing massive amounts of cloud storage and the industry is taking off.
...
Like I said though, this will interest people who are into things like Kodi.TV. It may not interest people with more traditional setups. But take a look around the AVSForum/Kodi.TV to see there is growing market of people who want this stuff, and it'd be insane for companies to ignore it as that's throwing money away and that pains my heart to even think about.
Makes me very very angry and it's one of my MAIN reasons I complain right now about high end gaming. I don't care about the performance/price ratio as much as I'm angry about how poor the cooling solutions are and QC, etc.
It may be flagship performance, but I expect flagship treatment in every aspect =/
It is not solved by any stretch of the imagination.The problem is already solved. Its just a cost/profit issue. Cheaper=more profit.
It is not solved by any stretch of the imagination.
A repair tech told me that they started to use paraffin and hot glue, (and some other stuff that I don't recall what he called it) and dip the coils in it to mitigate the issue.
It does help, but it doesn't eliminate the issue.
He also went on to say that you can use the most expensive parts out there, and it can still whine, so there is no direct correlation between cost and having parts that whine, in that, you can have bottom of the barrel parts, and those don't whine, yet, you have a $1200 video card, and it whines.
.........
It is not solved by any stretch of the imagination.
A repair tech told me that they started to use paraffin and hot glue, (and some other stuff that I don't recall what he called it) and dip the coils in it to mitigate the issue.
It does help, but it doesn't eliminate the issue.
He also went on to say that you can use the most expensive parts out there, and it can still whine, so there is no direct correlation between cost and having parts that whine, in that, you can have bottom of the barrel parts, and those don't whine, yet, you have a $1200 video card, and it whines.
I'm pretty happy with the cooling of my 980 Ti... after I threw the OEM cooler out the window and gave it an EK block and 360mm radiator to dissipate heat with.
Coil whine is sometimes very hard to predict. It is often not connected to your main frequencies (your GPU frequency) but to secondary periodic events (your GPU moving between power stages within a single frame for example). Those large load differences will result in a momentum on any coil in your system.Could the design of the pcb have anything to do with coil whine? Maybe manufacturers aren't paying enough attention to this problem.
The issue is, you then have four coils that could start singing due to other periodic events.But could it be from taking shortcuts when designing the circuit itself? Sure, if you rely on a single inductor it would whine, but if you redesign the circuit to use 4 inductors instead to eliminate whine, that's more expensive.