Soft High Pitch Whine Heard From Power Brick: Cause of Concern?

Another strange query from me (lol): I heard some really soft high pitch whining from my power brick. I suspect it is there for quite some time (maybe since the beginning?), just that my ears have recovered recently (had temporary loss of hearing on my right ear)

Is it something I should be worried about since I heard that such noises in desktop PSUs indicate an aging PSU?

Thanks!

 

That depends on whether the noise is caused by (coil) resonance or a leaking capacitor (these can also resonate). The former is harmless, but the latter can be problematic in the long run, presuming the adapter will be stressed. Finding out which it is is a bit difficult without opening it up, which in itself is a bit of a pain, too ... Chances are good it's merely resonance, since that's a rather common by-effect of using high-power components in very small packages, necessitated by a laptop adapter's small form-factor.

Have a slim 120W adapter that made a high-pitched whine under load. It annoyed me somewhat, so opened it up and replaced the culprit with a higher rated model, solving the problem:

Spoiler: König Slimline 120W, possible sources of noise

Could buy a new adapter of course, but there's a chance that one too will be audible since resonance is not a technical malfunction per se, merely a by-product. Replacement parts are cheap, usually less than $1, so soldering is a nice solution even in case of leaking capacitors. Could also pad/embed the noisy component with silicone, which is exactly what that white goo is for (also silicone, non-coincidentally).

 

Wow, I didn't know there's two types of coil whine... And while I have soldered my own tube amp (and even fixed it), I am not sure if I am ready to open up the power brick to see it!

Anyway, the whine is quite intermittent. Right now I have not heard anything. Yet.

 

Well one is coil whine, the other is a "singing" capacitor created by gases escaping the capacitor (this means it will dry out quickly).

Most bricks do have a slight hum. You will find it varies by the load on the brick.

 

I hope it is just that slight hum...

 

It can be annoying but I wouldn't say it's something you need to be concerned about unless it's accompanied by some other problem. Many bricks have some sound, but few are audible above ambient room noise ,and fewer still are actually malfunctioning when they're making a noise.

 

Quality has really gone down these days... It used to be that if anything had a whine you returned it and got another but now coil whine is everywhere so we are told to just accept it. I have two Clevo 330W bricks and neither have whine and my ancient 240W Dell brick doesn't either. It wouldn't be acceptable at all to me if they did.

 

It has always been there and many modern parts will not hum, but as frequencies increase this will become a harder and harder problem.

 

Except we have been using the exact same A/C adapters for years. It's cheap manufacturing that's the issue in the case of power supplies.

 

As frequencies of the loads increases (eg switching speed of your cpu) the load profile on the brick changes. This can set up resonant harmonics in the power delivery and brick that will vary machine to machine. It's an incredibly complicated problem to deal with.

I have opened some of these supplies and the caps are still the same high quality required for efficient delivery in a closed space.

 

Hmm, I don't seem to be able to hear that sound and there are no other strange issue. Going to observe further

 

If it's not loud enough to annoy you then it's fine

 

It is not the volume, it is the high pitch lol. Actually I am investigating a strange high pitch that I can hear sometimes, am trying to eliminate possible causes one by one

 

Phone chargers can do this, anything electrical really. I am very sensitive, especially when trying to sleep, I can track it down pretty quickly.

 

Sensitivity can also decrease with your age, you lose higher frequency pickup as you get older even if your overall hearing doesn't suffer.

 

Studies show that as we age, our sensitivity to higher frequencies diminishes - so on a positive note, if you're still using this computer years down the road, you probably won't notice the noise at all.

 

It runs in my family not to loose our high range hearing, my aunt can hear just the same as a young teenager.

 

Unfortunately it's the same for me. I am ridiculously sensitive to it. If anything it's gotten worse with age, not better.

 

Maybe it's just grumpiness that has gone up?

 

Well that definitely has too but when I was a kid, the electrical buzz of a ceiling fan wouldn't keep me up at night, I wouldn't have cared about coil whine noise from my GPUs... Hell I just bought a mini fridge for my room and its quiet as hell but I can still hear it hum if I want to.

Now my memory on the other hand... That's going the opposite direction.

 

I can't stand CRT monitors/TVs on standby humming like crazy.

 

Cable box, PS4 fan, 780 Ti warbling, 980M coil whine, even the whine my OLED on my vape mod can get on my nerves. The ceiling fan was by far the worst though. It had a dimmer switch on it and I had to have it taken off and I still can't sleep in my bed because of the electrical whine when it's on. Good thing I like my armchair...

 

Maybe get a different kind of dimmer to reduce the noise.

 

Well erm, while the high pitch confirms that my hearing is getting back to normal (lost half of my hearing last year due to internal bleeding), it still indicated a problem.

So, what happened was that I have a Dell XPS 420 as my backup computer too... and turns out that its PSU is the main source of the coil whine! At first I decided to ignore it, until it started giving me strange problems these few days like complaining about RAM and USB issues when there was none to being unable to boot past the BIOS.

So I added 1 and 1 and figured that the PSU is dying and so I replaced it with a spare PSU to confirm this. Now the coil whine is gone but now also doing some tests to ensure its stability.

And yes, I still hear some charging noises from my Sager sometimes, but it is rare and only if you put your ears really close to the battery or charger

 

I think that faint noise is coil whine and the other noise may have been capacitor singing (drying caps is the leading cause of PSU death).

 

Hmm I think so too. If there is indeed two sources of noise, I think the more serious one came from the bad PSU while the other one came from the laptop charger doing its own thing.

And come to think of it, I was lucky that I can change the PSU before it was too late. I think I heard a small pop coming from somewhere in my room right before I changed it

 

A good PSU if it dies should only shut itself down and not damage any thing else but if you do notice something is up then quick replacement is ideal, nice catch.

 

Ah I see, I hope most PSUs out there in today's market are good enough to do that. I heard that it is not easy to establish the damage done by the PSU to other connected components, right?

 

The known brand units like FSP and Delta electronics should be good. Electronics fault finding can always be a tricky business.

As always the no brand cheap "compatible" adapters are a lottery.

 

Wow, while Delta's stuff are not available here (I think?), FSP's PSUs are sure cheap here. 59 SGD for a 500W PSU for example

 

Different division to the notebook brick side, they are on the cheaper side normally though.