Core 2 Processor Whine - am I missing something?

My understanding is that all Core 2 hardware, because of C3/C4 states, will do it. Disabling those states will ding your battery life and potentially screw with system stability (as was the case on an XPS M1330 I had but returned).

Now that I'm back laptop hunting, is there anything I should know as far as avoiding that god****ed processor whine? I'm pretty touchy with sounds, so that bothered me to no end.

 

My personal suggestion is to go with the new Centrino cpu's (Montevina chipsets).
P7350, P8400, P8600, etc ...
They consume less power and have a faster FSB than T8100, T8300 CPU's for example.

As for sound ... unless you can customize the laptop before you buy it, essentially you will get what is inside.
Usually, that's the on-board (integrated) sound card ... which by itself is not too bad in my personal experience.
Serves it's purpose really.
The only trouble is finding drivers for those on-board sound cards at certain occasions.

 

I've never heard a processor whine before. What pitch is it (frequency)?
Is it worse than my ex-wife's whine ?

 

No idea what the frequency is, but it's awfully high-pitched. Probably comparable to your ex-wife, even if not in pitch.

 

Hrm... am I out of luck on this one?

 

I dont hear it on my studio 15.

 

Maybe some crappy toroidal coils that are resonating. I thought that problem was mostly resolved in the notebook/computer market.

-J.B.

 

That was a major issue that M1330 owners had when they 1st came out. Haven't heard such problems with any Centrino 2 notebooks so far.

 

What's the word on Centrino 2 XPS notebooks? Apologies if I'm missing something.

 

LOL

My Old 1520 Had a loud whine to it, if that helps...

 

I personally have no idea. Not a follower of Dell notebook news myself.

 

Okay, lets get this straight.
CPU's do not whine. They cannot make any noise. PERIOD.
The only parts which can make noise beside the harddrive, and the fans are transformers, PWM circuits and Capacitors. This whole CPU Whine issue is completely related to the PWM chips on the motherboard.
By undervolting and enabling different power settings for the processor can reconfigure the microcontroller controlling voltage flow, thus making the whine (overloading) of the PWM's to go away.

Download CPU Rightmark an go into the advanced CPU tab and reconfigure the power states, and that will solve the issue.

K-TRON

 

I'm guessing the opening poster has already tried that based on his post. Indeed it isn't a solve-all - RMCPUClock with C4 disabled does tend to cause stability issues on battery (such as total complete freezes) on Dell laptops.

Based on my experience, there's three options assuming RMCPUClock is causing unacceptable stability problems:

*Change operating systems. I have this problem only with certain OS'es on my computer; I don't know why but my guess is something to do with power management. Vista and Gentoo Linux have the whine problem; XP and Solaris do not. Otherwise I'm not sure. But if you still had your XPS 1330, you could have tried a Linux distro or two and my guess is before too long you would have hit one without that problem.
*Buy a newer (Penryn/Montevina) CPU. I haven't heard of any of those having this problem.
*Go AMD. The most safe solution overall, as I haven't heard of any AMD CPU's with this problem. I know Intel is often faster, but this same problem had me wishing I had gone AMD for awhile (until I changed OS and that mysteriously solved the problem).

 

Don't disable C4. Disable popup/popdown that removed the miniscule whine I had on my XPS M1530. However I cant hear it if i dont place my ear right next to the CPU so i reenabled them.

 

It may not be relevant to current notebooks, but my ASUS A7N8X motherboard used to whine. Disabling the digital audio output in device manager and setting the microphone to 'digitize input' stopped all the whining.

At times I used to get a faint whine on my Toshiba A210 (AMD Turion X2) when using the 'High Performance' power plan, it didn't really bother me (it was nothing compared to the ASUS motherboard) but undervolting has eliminated it.

 

Sorry, poor wording. We'll call it motherboard whine.

I did change the power states on my briefly-owned XPS M1330, but I decided that it wasn't worth trimming ~20-30 minutes - in my experience - from my battery for such a problem. I'd love to see Centrino 2 become a platform that doesn't exhibit that whine / becomes available on the M1330, because my hearing is just a little too sensitive for that crap. Drives me crazy.

 

Ah ha, there it is. Mother-in-law whine. Knew it all along. I agree that CPUs operate at frequencies well above the hearing range of a bat. Other MB components are more likely the culprits as stated above.

 

My pentium 4 cpu made a whining noise when i forget to hook up the Fan.

 

Lack of fan probably induced a "hot flash". Diagnosis:Menopause

 

Unfortunately, Montevina equipped laptops can whine. Strangely enough, if I enable Bluetooth, it stops.

 

That is probably because the power draw from the bluetooth was probably enough to draw the current in the PWM's down enough that they were not being overloaded.


K-TRON

 

haha same thing with my m860tu apparently how goofy