CPU squeaking during World of Warcraft gameplay

coryvb123

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Jan 8, 2009
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A few months ago I put together a new system for myself. I've built many systems in my time and had no real problems, until now. The following is the important stuff that I bought initially:

MBO: ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI
CPU: AMD Athlon x2 6000+ 120W
RAM: 4GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400
VID: Sapphire Radeon HD 3650
PSU: Ultra X-Connect 600W
OS: Windows XP 32-bit SP3
Upon putting it together I heard a soft squeak/squeal coming from the CPU area on the motherboard. I tried everything to troubleshoot, including trying different RAM, HDD, PSU, CPU (same model), MD (same model). Nothing worked. It wasn't a fan squeaking as I stopped every fan in the box with my finger. Finally I tracked down this forum post at TomsHardware.com. My problem was the 120 watt CPU. Fearing I had already done some harm to the current motherboard and as motherboards are cheaper than CPUs I purchased a new motherboard that would handle the 120 watt CPU. (The warranty from newegg was up and as the forum post says, ASUS wasn't taking responsibility for it)

I purchased this motherboard from Gigabyte as it said it supports 140 watt CPUs and my particular model was on the supported CPU list.

Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H

Yes, I realise it's the same chipset as the old motherboard but I've read that it's not the chipset that can't handle the 120 watts, but the cooling of the mosfets, plus it should handle 140 watts and it's on the list.

So anyway, I put it together and everything seemed to be working fine. A day later a different but similar sound starts eminating from the CPU area. It wasn't there all the time, and it would go away after a while. I decided to ignore it since everything worked. The NEXT day my onboard NIC stopped working. I won't get into that issue, but needless to say I sent the motherboard back to be exchanged. I finally get the new motherboard and install it. No noises... good. NIC works... good. But now when I start up World of Warcraft and get to the actual game screen.... the NOISE is back and louder than ever! Close WoW and the noise goes away. Change the in-game video settings and the noise goes away while the video is reseting. The sound is consistant whether I'm using onboard video or my PCI-e video card.

Here is a link to an mp3 recording of the sound my CPU is making while playing WoW:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0YGD8Q7L

The mic is right next to the cpu so there is some fan/wind noise. It also sounds louder than it really is, although the sound is fairly loud. The changes in frequency and intensity is a result of me moving the view around inside World of Warcraft. Towards the end, when it almost goes away I've grabbed a window on my second monitor and I'm shaking it back and forth.

Now, everything else I've tried on the computer works just fine. The only time I've heard that sound is inside World of Warcraft. Movies work fine, other games work fine, etc. Maybe it's not the 120 watt CPU and something WoW is doing... I dunno.

Someone HELP me... I'm going crazy here!
 

antiacid

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Oct 21, 2008
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squealing sounds usually come from capacitors leaking a bit. It can range from harmless to omgwtfexplosion.

I'd normally suggest to take each parts out and re-check for noise but it seems you already did that.

It also seems that you can correlate the noise with the active state of the cpu. This, to me, is an indication that there is something wrong in the cpu/mobo combo. It is possible that you got a ridiculous string of motherboards that were all defective, but unlikely. Perhaps try to underclock the CPU and see if it still does the noise? In that case, I'd try RMA'ing the CPU.
 

coryvb123

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When I tried my PCI-e card I did completely disable the onboard from the BIOS.

I've been looking around for odd looking capacitors... Can't find anything out of the ordinary.

I've been running CPU/video stress tests on it for a while now and I can't get the sound to return. Only in World of Warcraft.... so odd. WoW uses DirectX by the way
 

coryvb123

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-------------------
Breakthrough!
-------------------

Upon searching the forum, I found one about OpenGL. I opened the game from the command prompt using:

wow.exe -opengl

No sound..... It was like heaven!

Now, the game doesn't seem to run quite as well when running in this mode. And I'd like to not have to use a "work around" every time if I don't have to. Any ideas as to why this is? Maybe a setting in BIOS or ATI CCC I should check out?
 

coryvb123

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I've tried my onboard video and my PCIe card. They both make the same noise.

Onboard: ATI Radeon 3200
PCIe: Sapphire Radeon 3650

OpenGL is silent, but jerky. Even at the lowest video settings Direct3d makes the noise, but everything seems to work fine.

Another interesting issue. The noise only happens in certain areas of the gameworld. All the areas of the original game make the noise, as far as I can tell. It's spotty in Outland, and Dalaran makes no noise. I'm guessing those areas use certain polygons or something...
 

antiacid

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Hm, seems like you have a video card issue?

I'd take it to the blizzard forums so that they are made aware of the issue. They are more likely to suggest possible fixes and whatnot (with a 11mil customer base, you can bet some money that some poor schmuck also got the same problem hehe).
 

coryvb123

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I finally figured out the issue. I did a full reinstall of Windows and the problem went away! Despite having the same chipset and NIC, etc the motherboard apparently didn't like something that was installed (driver-wise). Lesson learned... When you change your motherboard, reinstall Windows. It just makes everything easier.

I can't believe the craziness I had with this thing. I could see having performance issue with the wrong drivers, or BSODs, etc, but a crazy NOISE from the CPU?! Anything is possible I suppose.

Thanks All for your suggestions!