High pitch noise :(

[Serologic]

Hi!! i have this weird problem which occured today. I dont know for sure what could be so i ask you guys.

I have 2 HDD's, the first one is an WD 200GB, and the second one Black Caviar 750GB WD.

While playing BC2 (game installed on the 200GB HDD) from the main menu to in-game, something is making this high pitch squeaky scratchy sound.

Everything was fine until today...while playing, the sound im talking about intensifies to the point where the framerate crashes to 15-20FPS out of the sudden (from 50-60). (GFX card 8800GTS 320mb)

And stays that way and for a very short time goes up again and so on.But mostly at 20fps. And the sound is there all the time.

What could it be? i have to mention i have no problem with heating, and dust etc.

And after i exit the game, when i move my cursor on desktop (using XP SP3 btw) it does that same noise but a little taddier now. All this until the point of whatever causes this "cools down" if i can say it like this.

And then again it appears again once i play some games on my PC or if i download something with very fast speed (10mb/sec).

Oh and i forgot to say that in Windows, im 100% there is no performance loss, or choking and any kind of that stuff. Everything seems to be staying still and working fine in windows...although the sound is there too when doing the above.


First i said, hey maybe its this damn 750GB HDD. Ok lets disable it from device manager.

Still that damn sound. Guess its not the 750GB HDD?

Then i delete the game and install it on the 750Gb HDD. After all that pretty much means the game reads from the 750GB one and not the 200GB HDD, so that should narrow down the problem right? NOT! its still the damn sound.

I tried other games and its pretty much the same without much performance loss. If i look at the sky, the sound is very low. If i look at the ground, heavy objects and stuff, that sound goes crazy again!


Right now playing Bad Company 2 is like trying to drive an car with engine problems.Will get stucked on the way....


What could cause this? does anyone has a clue what could it be? could the HDD impact the framerate so bad? is it the GFX card? anyone?

and sorry my english.

 

[Hawkeye22]

This doesn't sound like a hard drive problem as much as an audio driver problem or perhaps a chipset driver problem. Also, have you updated your video drivers recently? Does the event viewer show anything out of the ordinary?

 

[Serologic]

This doesn't sound like a hard drive problem as much as an audio driver problem or perhaps a chipset driver problem. Also, have you updated your video drivers recently? Does the event viewer show anything out of the ordinary?

Updated video drivers and its the same. And pardon me i forgot to mention the annoying sound is coming from the PC case somewhere around the HDD.

 

[hang-the-9]

Get a drive test utility from the drive vendor, and run it on both drives. Or try HD Tune, there is a drive scanner in that program. Or Ultimate Boot CD also has some drive scanners. If you suspect the drive is going bad, and you have files you don't want to lose, you're better off getting a new drive now before the thing fails on you suddenly. At the least you will have a new backup drive if the current drive is OK.

 

[Serologic]

I think i nailed the problem guys...it seems my CPU fan is dying. I think. It used to go up to 5000rpm.

Now it wont rise past 3270rpm.

And i think the framerate is slowing down because my CPU temp which rises up to 65 degrees celsius. But i thought that is normal...my CPU is an AMD Athlon X2 6000+. Well seems the cheapest way to "fix" the problem so i will go for it.

Thanks for your advices i will try the HDD scanners too just to be sure.

Solved : it was the CPU fan making that noise, because it could not go higher and he was forcing himself or something like that. And the CPU was getting hotter by the minute. Thats why the performance lag.