I've been hearing a high-pitched noise coming from my motherboard, near the CPU area, whenever I move my mouse (I'm using a Redragon Bullseye DPI at 3200 and a polling rate of 1000). I switched to a different mouse (Logitech G502), but the sound persists. The weird part is that lowering the polling rate to 250 completely stops the noise. Checking the task manager shows my CPU load at about 10% with the 1000 polling rate and around 3-4% at 250. My setup is a 12100F CPU with an ASrock H610M-HVS motherboard. Performance seems fine, and temperatures are normal (35-37°C idle, max 55°C under load). My Windows 11 setup is also debloated. Is this normal? Am I overloading my CPU? Has anyone else experienced this, or could there be malware affecting it?
1 Answer
Sounds like you're experiencing coil whine. It's pretty common and, while it can be annoying, it's usually harmless. Lowering the polling rate does help with the noise, but you might find that gaming with a lower rate can slow down your response times a bit. Make sure your motherboard has the latest BIOS update and that your chipset drivers are up to date for optimal CPU performance. By the way, what GPU are you using? Sometimes coil whine can come from that too.
I'm using an RX6600, but I doubt it's from the GPU since the noise is clearly coming from the CPU area.