Is high pitched squealing from the motherboard common?

[nordlead]

I recently purchased a ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3, and it worked perfectly except that it squeals at an unacceptable level. I RMA'd the board and got a new one that does the same thing only slightly quieter. I then turned around and bought an ASUS P8Z68-V Gen 3 from a different retailer in case the first retailer had a bad batch from ASRock. I'm now in the possession of two very annoying motherboards.

It does this as soon as the switch on the back of the PSU is flipped (therefore I know it is not the fans since the system isn't powered on and the fans aren't running). I've removed everything from them (with the exception of the CPU) and tried 2 different PSUs. I used both PSUs on my old AMD motherboard and never heard squealing like this from them.

Is this a common thing with these new motherboards, or is there something I'm missing, or do I just have really bad luck?

 

[itzdanielp]

It seems to be a pretty common problem with a lot of Z68 boards.


What is causing the problem is noisy voltage converters and chokes that supply power to the processor and RAM.

While not a bad problem, it is extremely annoying.

I have seen plenty of these issues with both ASRock and Asus, I would suggest maybe a Gigabyte board as I haven't really seen any problem with those.

 

[nordlead]

I just hate to waste all this money on shipping because there aren't many local dealers and they don't have much of a selection.

Part of the reason I went with the ASRock and ASUS in the first place is because they had heatsinks on the entire VRM and had good features for the price. I'll have to consider Gigabyte, but I need to see about returning these boards first

SuperBiiz offered to give me a shipping label to return the second ASRock board (don't know why they didn't offer the first time) but I have to give them proof, which is really hard to capture due to the high frequency of the squeal. So at least with a little work I won't be wasting another $15 sending that one back.

 

[itzdanielp]

I know the feeling

I personally always stick with Asus / Gigabyte, but as you have found out a lot of the Asus Z68's have had this issue.

ASRock is just a value-component company under Asus, so it would make sense that they would have similar problems.

Gigabyte makes some good boards, and I haven't heard of problems like that from them.

If you have a glass vase or something like that if you put your microphone (or cell phone, whatever you are using to record the sound) in it, and point it towards the sound it will help the mic pick up the frequencies.