Added on Nov 9: I put the old cooler back in place, as per Keltari's suggestion, and while the sound is much less pronounced, upon close inspection I can still hear it. It may have been there all along, just not loud enough for me to hear it well enough. The new cooler has a larger fan, perhaps drawing more power, and is also heavier due to the larger heatsink, but putting a little extra weight onto the old cooler doesn't seem to impact the sound. Is it simply a poor quality motherboard?
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I replaced the CPU cooler in a PC I built earlier this year, and while everything seems to be working properly, the motherboard now emanates a kind of intermittent sound somewhere between a beep and a "screech" that it never used to previously. Things I did prior to this:
- Replaced the CPU cooler;
- Moved the 2 memory modules I have to different slots for easier future upgrades;
- Spilled a bit of cooling paste onto the motherboard (oops). It fell on the side of the PCIe slot my graphics card is in. I cleaned it up and could find no other spills on the board;
The sound is not continuous, and it is a little different from what I hear in "coil whine" videos, but it seems I to be triggered primarily (but not exclusively) by things happening on the screen, like:
- Playing a video (passively), e.g. YouTube full-screen
- Pressing a key on the keyboard and holding it (audible only when this results in text on-screen)
- Scrolling through web pages
At first I thought it might be the graphics card, because the noise persists when the framerate is high or something is happening on the screen, but after removing the card I would hear it again.
I should add that when I first booted the computer after replacing the cooler, I got a POST error with a countdown, but it then proceeded to boot into Windows. There it became obvious that the time and date had been reset (now resolved), even though I had not touched the CMOS battery.
- With no other hardware changes other than the CPU cooler, what might cause the screeching sound? How do I go about finding the source? Could it be the CPU?
- What could have caused the date to be reset, if the battery has not been touched?
Computer specs:
- Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3 6.0 motherboard
- AMD FX-6300 processor
- be quiet! Shadow Rock Top Flow SR1 CPU cooler
- Nexus Value 430W PSU
- 2x Kingston 4 GB DDR3-1867 / PC3-14900 memory
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 610
- Crucial m4 CT128M4SSD2 128GB SSD
- Windows 7 Professional 64-bit