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!
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!