"Bzzzzzzzzzzt"

Look inside your case and make sure no wires are rubbing any cooling fans.

Totally sounds like a fax machine. Is this something that just started out of the blue? or is it something that's been happening since day 1?

And your power supply is?? It maybe your power supply.

OK I checked your case the power supply is 450 watts. So you get a case and a power supply for $100. My bet is it is the power supply straining. You did say you had an 8800 card correct.

To h2oman, he's got a 6800 card, not an 8800. That it isn't an 8800 should be more obvious since he has an AGP board, not PCI-E.

Mobius might well be correct about a fan bearing being noisy. From what I've noticed, often times the psu that ships with a case is not a top line model, or is a reject for direct sale, so it may have had a bad fan bearing from the start.

You might try downloading Speedfan and using it to slow down the various fans until the noise goes down or stops. Just watch the cpu temp close while you are slowing down the heatsink fan. Don't want to overheat the cpu.

Perhaps I should clarify. The bad fan bearing could be the one in the power supply. That would make the psu bad, or at least ready to go bad at any time, whenever the fan finally gives out completely. Speedfan should allow checking of every fan except the one in the psu. If no other fan appears bad, the remaining one would be the cause, the one in the psu.

There are many things that can make a noise..i have had coils buzz and have heard allot of fans start to go....but they were LOUD.....i mean LOUD...then they calm down....as for the power supply....the fan on the back will not be spinning all the time...so it should be easy to check that.....as for the inside one....i think it is ball bearing....in my past it has always been sleeve bearings that get loud and grind to a halt....balls tend to just go through anything....

I though it sounds like a dot matrix printer... are u sure you are not on one of those?

I do think you will have to test fans by stopping them...only for a short time(it wont hurt them)....but stopping the psu fan may be bad....just listen near it....sounds from the psu will be obvious.... also some optical drives make allot of noise....so check that too....

Right! Huge apologies for dragging up an old thread, but I think I've diagnosed the problem so please disregard anything said above!

Tried a different AGP card yesterday, it was an old GeForce 2 and it worked absolutely fine without any noise whatsoever. My first question is, does this definitely mean it's the graphics card or is there a chance that the GeForce 2 doesn't push the motherboard so much and might not be using one of the bits that was causing the noise?

My second question, should it actually be the graphics card (I'm almost certain it is) is basically which card I should get? My specs are only AMD Barton 2500+ and 1GB of RAM so I don't want to spend silly money on it, ideally I just want something at least even to my 6800, but preferably one that has low power consumption/low temperatures so I can keep the fan speed down as in my current PC the card is by far the noisest thing regarding the fans.

Thirdly, my friend has decided he actually likes the noise my card makes and has offered to swap my card for his 9800 XT, at the time he thought his was slightly better and didn't mind swapping 'cos he never uses his computer any more, but after looking up some benchmarks it seems the 6800 is quite a bit better than his, my question is should I swap? Is my card a potential liability and will it die in his PC? I'd like to swap but not if it's going to die on him, and not if there's going to be a big performance difference.

Thanks guys and apologies for bringing the old thread up, just I'm so close to a conclusion at the moment so if you could help me with that I'd really appreciate it.

Brilliant, thanks! My PSU isn't too good, it's a 370W TruPower PSU that came with my Antec Sonata case. Or rather, it's apparently a good PSU but has a fairly low power rating.

Am tempted by the X1650 AGP, can get one for about £72, not sure whether to go for that or whether to go for the X1950 at around £130, will the X1950 not really show up my other parts like low RAM and terrible CPU?

Just got my new card, w00t! Running quite well I think, going to try some games etc now and see how it performs.

One final question; can anyone recommend some software to control the fans speeds etc? I haven't tried the ATI control panel 'cos I've heard bad things and generally don't like 'bloated' software so it'd be great if there was a decent/lightweight program that'd sort the fan speeds. Cheers!

Brilliant cheers, I think I'll go with ATI Tool because my case fan already runs very quietly, and my CPU fan has it's own hardware fan speed control thing. ATI Tool looks neat!