I'm preparing to return my fourth RTX 5070 Ti because of coil whine. Two ASUS TUF cards whined loudly under load, a Gigabyte Gaming OC had a constant roughly 11 kHz tone whenever the PC was powered on, and my current MSI Gaming Trio OC buzzes loudly enough that I can hear it while scrolling through webpages, before even starting a demanding workload.
A friend's RTX 4080 was quiet in this exact system, so I'm trying to figure out whether I've simply had terrible luck or whether quiet 5070 Ti cards are unusually rare. Are certain manufacturers, model tiers, or power designs generally better for coil whine? Is there anything I should look for when choosing the next card?
If avoiding the noise is mostly luck, would an acoustically insulated case help, or would increasing the fan speed to mask the whine be more practical? I need CUDA, so switching to a Radeon 9070 XT isn't really an option. Limiting power may not help much, and I spend most of my time in Linux, where NVIDIA undervolting support is limited.
The rest of the system consists of an ASRock X870 Pro RS motherboard, Ryzen 7 9700X, and be quiet! Straight Power 11 850W power supply. I also tested a newer 1000W ATX 3.1 power supply and saw no improvement.
5 Answers
You might have better luck with a different model, but there isn't a dependable list of completely silent 5070 Ti cards. Some people report quiet ASUS TUF or similar higher-end models, while others get loud examples from the same line. A case with more acoustic damping can reduce how much escapes, but airflow-focused cases usually transmit high-pitched whine easily. Headphones or more noticeable fan noise can mask it, though that is more of a workaround than a fix.
I have a TUF 5070 Ti that is effectively silent from my normal seating position; I only hear the case and GPU fans. That doesn't prove the model is consistently quiet, but it does show that quiet samples exist. If you keep trying, I would choose a different board design or model tier rather than repeatedly buying the same card, and test for noise immediately while you still have an easy return window.
The fact that a quiet RTX 4080 worked in the same computer makes the PSU and adapter much less suspicious. Coil whine depends on the individual inductors, board design, load pattern, and sometimes the exact frame rate, so four noisy samples in a row is unlucky but not impossible. If the noise is unacceptable, returning cards is really the only way to find a quieter sample; manufacturers generally don't treat coil whine as a defect unless it is extreme.
Coil whine is unfortunately a lottery. Even cards from the same model line can behave very differently, and changing brands doesn't guarantee anything. Frame-rate limiting can reduce it, especially in menus or other situations where the GPU is rendering hundreds of frames per second, but it won't necessarily eliminate noise under normal load. Once you notice a particular frequency, it also becomes much harder to ignore.
If your software supports it, undervolting is worth trying because lower voltage and power can reduce the noise as well as temperatures. A power limit may help too, although the effect varies by card. Since Linux is your primary OS and NVIDIA undervolting is restricted there, this probably isn't a reliable solution for your setup.
That's the problem I keep running into. I can set a power limit in Linux, but the cards still whined even when their measured power draw was relatively low, so I don't expect it to solve this particular issue.