High pitch sound when Oc'ing

[Alwaysrun]

Update to my video card squealing like a stuck pig. I reset the card to stock and turned my fan speed up a tad and that initially solved the problem when the card was at full load. Well sadly the squeal is back so I called XFX tech support and the guy said it's not the VRM but a capacitor or choke and he suggested I RMA it back to NCIX seeing it's only 10 days old. I wasn't really looking forward to going without folding or gaming for 2 weeks so I did some more digging on a solution to this problem and I found a very interesting article regarding this almost exclusive Nvidia design flaw.

It seems that all Nvidia partners except EVGA are bound by Nvidia reference board manufacturing process and they really cheaped out on the analog capacitors and chokes instead of doing what ATI did to resolve the issue by making all their capacitors solid-state and sheilding the chokes. Yet another Nvidia design flaw which ATI addressed long ago by including Digital PWM (Digital Voltage regulator module). Anyways this article explains the finer details and even goes to the enth degree to show exactly how to resolve this minor issue without going through the pain and hassle of a RMA. It's really a fantastic read and I highly recommend anyone owning a Nvidia card to give it a look. I'm curious if the new GTX 285 and 295 suffer from this same problem or if Nvidia got a clue and finally stopped cheaping out.

Nvidia’s “deadly” flaw and how to fix it - no more GTX280 squealing! Theo’s Bright Side Of IT

[sswilson]

It never crossed my mind that the components on a vid card might not be accessable for the eraser trick, but their solution is essentially the same as mine, except I suggested epoxy, and isolating the specific component that's squealing rather than doing them all. :)

[zlojack]

The GTX 285s squeal a bit, too.

[DarKStar]

Indeed these sounds come from the caps - I have done some very high OCing on my 8800GT 512 from BFG and not one squeal, same on the motherboard, noiseless......... My old 8800GTS 320MB from BFG did it although it sounded like a squeal and rattle snake type sound, but the card was solid as a rock nonetheless........Why RMA your card if it works - when you are playing games the sound of the game will usually overpower the squeal - otherwise if your squeal is that bad then maybe you should indeed RMA it before one of the caps explodes on you :D