Coil whine on Radeon 6000 series SOLVED
Discussion
EDIT: After a year, the coil whine is virtually gone. Very hard to hear unless right next to the card.
tl;dr : Just benchmark/stress test on a loop, extensively
Let me state first that I'm a gamer. I use my PC for gaming at 4K, period. Please consider this when I'm presenting my arguments.
I've recently built my first AMD system with a 5800X and a 6900XT. Yeah, the two items your mom, every youtuber, their uncle and their uncles' nephews' dogs have warned you about. I seriously am unable to understand the reasoning behind suggesting cheaper but slower and/or faster(maybe) but more expensive stuff over these.
5800X ? It's pretty obvious that due to it's architecture IT IS the FASTER one for gaming (CCX, CCD, IF, OMGWTFBBQ) So why 5900X ? 6800X runs hot? Not anywhere near my old 6900K. For the GPU, 6900XT is the fastest card of the three. I need every bit of extra FPS on 4K. So why 6800XT?
Also, if price/performance is your point, then I already saved money by buying a 5800X instead of a 5900X. You want me to save more with a 5600X by sacrificing performance? Why? 5700X does not exist. And if it did it will still be slower than a 5800X. This argument is illogical. I was going to buy a 3090. I'm very glad I bought a 6900XT. It may be more expensive than a 6800XT but it is mostly at 3090 levels of performance for 1000 dollars less !
Enough of my rant. I will now return to the main issue. My XFX 6900XT (reference design) has coil whine from hell. It's practically singing. I have a Thermaltake core X71 so it is by no means an open case. Believe me when I say it's LOUD. No it's not because of my Corsair AX1500i. No, I don't use headphones. It's so bad that even while browsing the web it buzzes when I scroll a page. Unbelievable. I do not want to return it because I already walked through hell to find one. God knows when (and if) I would get a replacement. So I remembered that all my past radeon cards (9500 PRO, 9700 PRO, X850XT, X1900XTX) had some kind of a quality control issue, especially with power delivery. And I was a technician back in the day at an automobile sound system company. What opens up virgin coils like a champ? Sustained heat and current.
So I got to work. I installed everything from 3dmark 03/06 to firestrike extreme (because I wanted tthe card to sing every frequency it can) and benchmarked. For 24 hours straight. And this morning, I found out I no longer have coil whine in windows applications. For games, it's still there. But noticeably better.
So I suggest everyone having coil whine issues to at least give this a try.