Help! My graphics card is whining at high refresh rates!

Whenever my graphics card is required to have really fast frame rates (like on menus) of over, say, 400 it starts whining. it has always been pretty quiet, and i have ignored it, but today in oblivoin in the menus (when fps can reach 1200) it was pretty loud, i could just hear it over the music in the menu, and it also sounds different, before it was kind of a hum, but now it is a "dirty" sounding whine, its hard to explain, but it sounds bad, and also louder. is this a problem? (i will check to see if it happens in UT 2004, but it always has, sometimes during gameplay but i will check)

EDIT: it does it in unreal tournament 2004 too, on the menus and stuff.

 

Refresh rates on LCD monitors never go above 60hz.

 

i meant frames per second, either way my problem is with my graphic card, not my moneter.

 

i get what you mean.

are you sure it only happens when rendering images at high frame rate and not any high load?

thats kinda interesting.

possibly its a driver thing - are you using drivers from your manufacturer or straight from nvidia / ati?

also, there might be dirt in your notebook around the fan?

i cant imagine why a high frame rate rendering on a menu would make your graphics card do that... i do know that in many games you can cap the fps either as an option or by editing .ini files... that might be a temporary solution.

(and many lcd monitors have refresh rates about 60 hz. youre plain wrong.)

 

LCD monitors don't have refresh rates at all, no matter what it says in Windows...they have response times (eg how quickly pixels can change as your monitor processes signal), most around 8-20ms. Refresh rates apply only where you have scan lines; in the case of computer monitors, that would be just CRTs.

 

you have it right, sorry for the confusion. It only happens at high framerate/low load, like a menu. it NEVER happens during high load, but it has happened in ut2004 when i look at the ground. i have the stock dell drivers. It isn't the fan, becuase when i first go into a game i hear it at the menu, then the fans come on a few seconds later.

 

either way i meant frame rates, i know the extra frames get scrapped, but when i have high frame rates is when the problem occurs.

 

capacitors whine if they're about to burst. if you've overclocked your gpu at all, you could have some capacitors which aren't too happy about it.

 

Erh, that's simply not correct. The refresh rate simply refers to how many times a second the information of each pixel on your screen is refreshed. It's related to the 'scanning' of the electron gun in CRT's, but with LCD's it's about the same thing albeit without the electron gun.

The difference is that slow refresh rates with CRT's result in flickering while LCD's have no problems in this area.

 

If I were you, I'd set the "refresh on vsync" thing and just let it go a maximum of 60fps. Less unnecessary data being thrown from the processor, meaning it could go faster (now that ATI has fixed it's vsync idle locking issues) and it'll keep your card from ramping up to those insane and completely unnecessary framerates.

For more info, you're probably hearing a capacitor whine as it's being rapidly charged and discharged, trying to keep voltage and current to the video RAM and/or the GPU steady.

 

okay, thats good to know, thnx, but the wine doesn't really bother me too much, is it dangerous? how big would the burst be if a capasiter blew? also, some games don't have vsync, like ut 2004, is there a way i can turn it on universily, even though i have a locked bios?

 

You can set it to be universal in the nvidia control pannel. Get there by right clicking on your desktop/settings tab/advanced/your card's tab.