Noctua NH-D14 fan noise issue.

Thanks for the replies. That pic is how he had it installed originally. But that noise started happening. And yes I noticed that left heatsink was more lose than the right. Now that noise is gone, but the fans are louder. Are the fans just louder when they are horizontal?

So yesterday he installed the cooler horizontally and took the fan from the side and put it on top of the case. When I brought it home, all the fans were a lot louder than they were before. Today I brought it back and he put it back on the original way, like in the picture you posted. He also gave me a Noctua fan for free put it as the exhaust and took the exhaust one and put it on top to blow air in. Now everything seems fine with all those fans and they are quiet. I think the problem was that he had installed my 2 ram sticks right next to each other and the outside noctua fan was pressing up against one of the sticks. I think that is what was causing the noise. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that noise is gone now but now there is a new problem. My damn MSI 780 ti is now making bad coil whine in every game I play . The card did not do this before. It was whisper quiet and now it has this annoying coil whine . I don't know what caused this but I'm very aggravated already with al this.

I'm getting the coil whine at 60fps and below as well. And I play a lot of different games. Some not very taxing at all and some extremely taxing like Crysis 3 or AC Black Flag.

consistent. Right now I'm playing SWTOR which only uses like 40% of the card so the fans are only spinning at 35% and it is making the noise but it's not very loud. When I play a more taxing game it gets very loud and obnoxious.

So heres exactly what happened. After he finished installing the cooler and some fans we connected the PC and turned it on to see how its working.
We turned on Unigine Heaven at max settings and about 10 seconds into the benchmark it froze up and the screen went black and said no power or something can't remember exactly. Then it stayed like this and even after I reset the PC, the screen was still black with that no power thing. After a few tries to reset it he asked me if it's overclocked (I'm assuming he meant the CPU) and I said no. Then he asked me if I register my products and I said most of them yes. After this he pressed something on the motherboard it looked like and then it started up normally but now the card was making this noise.

This computer guy knows his stuff for the most part and he's a good guy I mean he charges me very cheap for the work he does. But he did make a mistake when he put my PC together. I'm pretty sure, and he agrees with me, that the Noctua started making noise because the outside fan was pressed up against one of the RAM sticks. I saw how it was pressed up like that but I figured that's just how it had to be and that he knows what hes doing. When I examined the Noctua yesterday, the left heatsink was more lose than the right (the right side has the outside fan that was pressed up against the RAM stick). At first I thought that the left heatsink needed to be fastened tighter or something but now I realize that it was the right heatsink that needed to not be pressed up against a damn RAM stick. He actually asked me on his own if I knew if my RAM was dual channel or what.

Anyway, the mistake he made when putting my PC together was that he put the 2 RAM sticks in the first two slots. This is why the fan on the Noctua was pressed up against the second stick. Now the RAM sticks are in the 2nd and fourth slots. All of this could have been avoided had he installed the RAM properly =/

I don't know why this happened to my video card. I don't know if it had something to do with me bringing the PC to the store and back to my house 3 times in the last two days. I was very careful with it and didn't bang it or hit it against anything and the store is only 2 blocks from my house. Is this something that would have happened anyway? I don't know, I mean it has been here since I bought it a few months back and it never had this issue. The card always ran whisper quiet with the exception of a low coil whine in Call of Duty Ghosts (only a few levels at that).

What do you think?

I already took it out and packed it up for RMA. I put in a sapphire 7950 for the time being. It is making some noise but I think it's just the fans spinning.

I really should have just taken the rig after he moved the RAM sticks over. That noise the cooler was making was gone and everything was good but I thought the noise would just come back so I left it there for him to do whatever he was gonna do (which was flip the cooler over horizontally). If I had taken it home then everything would have been fine but I left it and he did what he did and the fans that were facing up became loud so I had to bring it back. After he put the cooler back on vertically and we started Unigine that's when everything went south. 10 Seconds into the benchmark it froze up and then black screen with no power message. Stayed that way even after we reset it a few times and only went back to normal after he pressed that factory reset button.

Unfortunately, it didn't all go back to normal. My 780 ti Gaming started making that noise which he said was coil whine but apparently it is not since it is always there during gaming.

Now there are more problems... After we did that factory reset he noticed that the fans were spinning very fast and making more noise so he started putting on filters. The filters limit the voltage to the fans and make them spin at minimum speed. I brought it home and today I noticed that the 2 fans in the front were louder than before. The case I have is the Carbide 500R. The fans on this case were very silent. When I turned it up to the highest setting on the controller they would make no more noise than when on low, not that I can hear anyway. I called him and said I don't like this noise I want it to be the way it was before and he said the only thing we can do is put filters on the fans that don't have them yet like the 2 in the front. He tried gave me excuses like when the CPU fans get quieter you start noticing the other fans more. It's all BS because I know those fans were silent. Anyway, I brought it back to him for a fourth time and he put filters on the 2 fans in the front and the 2 fans on the cooler itself. So now all the fans besides the 2 video card fans and the power supply fan have those filters. Now I can't control the fan speed anymore. I'm not seeing any change in temperature and from what I remember, turning up the the fan speed would only cool my overclocked 7950 by 2-3 degrees. I guess if the temps stay the same and the noise from the fans is low then there is no need to turn them up. But I still am upset that this happened and that I lost the control of my fans speed.

I want to know what could have caused this to happen. I know it all went to hell after it froze up or after he pressed the factory reset.
Could that factory reset have damaged the GPU? Could it have made the PSU make this noise and make all the fans spin outa control?
Was it the PSU that had a hiccup or something? =/

I mean the rig is still pretty quiet. The loudest thing is probably the power supply and even that isn't very loud. It's just barely audible to me when I'm sitting at the desk. The PC is on the floor not 2 feet away. But I know it was quieter before all this. I just wan't to know what is going on honestly.

Thanks for your replies by the way

Thanks I will try that now. What do you think about what happened with my other stuff? My Video card and my Power supply? Do you think its all the fans spinning too fast or something?

The video card started making a noise like coil whine and it gets louder as the GPU usage goes up (I'm guessing fan speed too)
And the Power supply is making a buzzing noise... Maybe the fan?

Could it be that the cmos clear made all the fans spin faster including the ones on the GPU and PSU?

so I just checked the bios. It shows the 2 CPU fans set to minimum 25% and max 100% and temp max 70 degrees.
After that it has 1, 2, and 3 system fans. The bar starts at 50 and its set at 60 for the first two. The third is not showing up.

Of course there is nothing there that controls the fans of the PSU or GPU.

Could pressing that button have messed up my power supply? or even video card?

Hmm if the CMOS switch is not to blame then I have no idea why the video card started making that awful noise. Same with the PSU.

My mobo is the MSI G45 z87.

All three show up at the bottom there where you can set different speeds for them. The third one has a min and max speed also, the other two do not. But where it says how fast they are currently spinning... The first one seems normal, the second one is bouncing between like 300 and 30000, and the third one doesn't show any RPM at all.

He took the original exhaust fan from the back and put it on the top of the case to blow air in. In place of the original exhaust fan, he put a Noctua fan. Same as the one in between the heatsinks on my cooler.

Hmm, you think something happened to the PCIe slot after that factory reset? I think this 7950 is making a similar noise to the 780 ti now and it's in the same slot. When I run Unigine it makes a low noise but when I quit Unigine, those few seconds in that loading screen make it go to like 5485 FPS and it makes the exact same noise the 780 ti made when I quit Unigine.

There's definitely something going on with the mobo I think. The 7950 is making that same constant buzzing coil whine sounding noise that the 780 ti was making only its lower. It's there at idle but hard to hear, it's audible during gaming.

That Unigine loading screen after you quit was making the sound go berserk for the few seconds the screen was there till it went back to windows. It did this with the 780 ti as well. Now I turned on Vsync and it is not doing it anymore during that screen. But is still making the sound during gaming or running unigine.

Thanks a lot man it is much appreciated. I will will you in as I go. Just now I was taking out the 7950 to put it in the second PCIe slot and I noticed the something with the connectors. My PSU has 4 6pin and 2 2pin connectors. The 6pin connectors are marked P14, P15, P16, and P17. It looks like P14 and P15 are supposed to go together and P16 and P17 go together. I had something like P14 and P17 connected. I even tried to take one out to plug in another and it wouldn't reach. Not sure if this makes any impact on anything or not, or if it did damaged anything.

Also, I put the 7950 into the second PCIe slot and connected P14 and P15 to it. It is making the same noise as before.

At first I thought maybe it's just the PSU that froze up that time and somehow got messed up in the process but then why would it start working again from hitting the CMOS button on the mobo?

I'm going to try 2 different things now. I guess first I will try to connect the P16 and P17 instead of the other two and see if that does anything. Then I will put the card back into the first PCIe slot and try that.

Ok I've tried the video card in both slots and tried switching the connectors and the noise is still there with any combo =/

I guess it can be only one of two things. Either a problem with the mobo or the PSU.