Easy way to work out what is the cause. In Afterburner or GPU tweak set your fan to manual and then to 100% is that the sound? If yes then your card is working darn hard in games and that is making the fan spin up to manage the heat. So the card is doing its job. 🙂

I was going to say it's probably coil whine. That or it's capacitors on their way out, which I doubt since it's a brand new card. My GTX 480's are starting to make some noises when stressed out. I'm sure this is due to the capacitors waiting to pop. If they do, whatever, lifetime warranty yo.

But yeah, the easy way to tell if it's coil whine is to manually set the fan speed after the sound starts to a slower speed like HiVizMan said. If the sound goes away, then you know it's the fan. The coil whine (what I've been told) should go away after a bit of use.

A coil whine from the video card is the coil resonating at a specific harmonic of the switching circuit of the power supply. This can be because of the type of coil used or its value, the design of the power supply switching circuit or less common the path through the motherboard. It can also be a combination of two or all three of these components.

Hey Mangame,

I am new here so dont immediately take my word for it but in my build I experienced the same as what you are probably hearing at this point.

If you mean with ultrasonic like its a high frequency noise or some crazy electricity sound it is probably coil whine. I swapped my psu first since my retailer asked me to do so since some components do not combine great, but that did not solved it. It was my gpu making the noise.

Maybe you could try the following steps and post your results here:

- install fraps, this will show you the framerates you have
- launch fraps
- open up the game that causes noise and see at what framerates you are getting the noise ( for this turn vsync off if you havent already, otherwise it will lock your frames )

For example with my first videocard, the msi gtx770, i got the coil whine when I went above 200 fps. It did not matter wich game it was. At like 60 fps it was also present but you needed to put your ear next to the gpu.

So the basic idea with the coil whine was: if frame rates go up, coil whine noise went up.

Since I hated the noise I swapped my gpu for a asus gtx770 and the noise was gone.

I found it really annoying just like you probably do, so you can try what I did and maybe its the same issue. If so just swap the card at your retailer they will understand. Atleast mine did, they did not found it acceptable.

Hope it helps, the guys here are really kind and got alot of knowledge so I am sure you eventually can figure it out with their help.

Good luck and let me know how it turns out 🙂

Rick