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I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and just a few hours ago, while working, it started making a weird, pretty loud, sound. This happens while using eevee in rendered mode and navigating the viewport, but not in developer mode nor with Cycles.

I'm worried about my card, and I can't work like this.

The sound also does not appear while doing benchmarks or playing games, it seems to be connected to Eevee rendered mode only. Turning off certain things like bloom, bumps and so on changes nothing.

Any ideas why this might happen?

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My guess is that you get to very high temperatures while working with EEVEE. This results in coolers working more intensely. I believe - I had a similar problem - one of the coolers might not be in a correct position. This way he touches parts of the plastic it is embedded in. What you could do yourself on your own risk: Grab an app that shows the temperature and the coolers (Like this one). Look if what I said above is true (Temperature goes up, cooling needs be turned up). You can even try the Powermax app from the link I posted. This tests your cpu/gpu coolers rpm at different loads. If you go to high load you know that my theory is true. Open the PC and take a look at the coolers. All the coolers, also cpu. Try to get the right cooler in its place. Do it carefully. Try different angles. Or take the pc to the closest shop. It's your call ;)

Hope it helped. Had a similar issue once.

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  • $\begingroup$ devenetly not cooling, fans are turned off and i have streight 55° with benchmark it got hotter, not in eevee. $\endgroup$
    – xxerbexx
    Feb 5, 2019 at 16:30
  • $\begingroup$ Strange... What is this sound like? $\endgroup$
    – Scyth
    Feb 5, 2019 at 16:33
  • $\begingroup$ it sounds like a old drive working... for me at least, i found some stuff and they were talking about "The card has coils in the power system to help smooth out the power with the capacitors. The regulator pulses the power VERY fast and the pulse rate changes with load(this is how the voltage is regulated). This can cause the coils to make a buzzing sound." but i dont get what that means, and it jsut randomly started and only on eevee?? btw also updated nvida driver, redownloaded blender, unplugt my 5000 usb devices and drives. I JUST DONT GET IT. $\endgroup$
    – xxerbexx
    Feb 5, 2019 at 16:42
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The phenomenon is indeed most likely coil whine and it's not dangerous for your card.

As you mentioned in your comment, the coils, or more accurately - the chokes, clean out high-frequency alternate current while letting low-frequency alternate current pass.

Chokes consist of comparatively quite thick copper wires that are wrapped around a cylindrical or ring-shaped ferrite core. On very old motherboards they looked very similar to this:

choke

On modern graphics cards, they are more likely housed in small black quadratic housings.

When the current passes the choke, the windings start to vibrate which may produce a high-pitched sound, quite similar to when you let a wine glass "sing" by rubbing your wet finger across its rim. These vibrations do not damage the chokes or the parts in their surroundings.

In "old times", when CRT monitors and (even more so) CRT TVs were still a thing, the sound was quite common, but people were so used to it that they noticed it only in the most extreme cases.

It's also no sign that your card is "broken" or "low quality". While it's true that some manufacturers produce cards that are more likely to suffer from this effect, the rest is just quality tolerance. One of my two R9 nano cards "whines" a little (only when using Eevee) while the other stays quiet under all circumstances.

While it's more or less annoying there is unfortunately no way to get rid of coil whine once and for all.

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