HX850 Gold Coil Whine & faulty fan controllers?
Hardware:
Asus p8p67 Deluxe
Intel i5 2500k
MSI GTX 680 Lightning
Silverstone Fortress 02
Corsair HX850 Gold
So, upgrading my gfx card to the "GTX 680 Lightning" I thought it would be a nice idea to swap out my old Seasonic 500w PSU at the same time to something a little bit more modern (and that could possibly handle two of those beastly gfx cards in the future). Going by reputation and hardware reviews, where else to look but to Corsair.
I got one of the newer gold certified HX850's, and looking at the outside alone, it certainly looked the part of being a good quality construction (except that it seemed to have been riveted together rather than by using screws, and the ball bearing fan could have been held in place with rubber grommets to reduce vibrations). Plugging it in I immediately noticed coil whine. :[pouts: Not incredibly loud.. but certainly enough to be annoying (I have tinnitus and my ears are somewhat sensitive to high pitched frequencies).
RMA'ed it through the dealer. Got the new one, and it turns out... it's worse than the previous. WTF! Coil whine is sometimes a sign of poor construction / low quality components.
Went on the forums to see if others were having the same problems with the new gold certified line as I do and I find this thread: http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85166 . Following the instructions by Corsair tech support and changing my C6 state settings from "enable" to "auto" and the coil whine did indeed go away. Yay.. Succes! HOWEVER, this is a solution I find LACKING, and to be honest disabling features some might find necessary and/or want to have enabled should not be regarded as a solution to something that is a design/construction flaw. I run a home built moderately overclocked nearly silent system that is on 24/7/365, and I need the "C* sleep states" and the CPU frequency scaling options enabled for power efficiency and to keep the temps and fan noise at minimum levels during idle or low load for everyday tasks. Changing the C6 state from "enabled" to "auto" and leaving the rest as they were (on "auto") I indeed find idle temps for the CPU being a few degrees higher (Celsius).
However, the coil whine is not the main gripe I have with these PSU's, it's the fan controller. The HX* gold series is marketed as having an "intelligent" super low noise fan that only ramps up from 0 rpm when system load goes above 20%. This was in fact the main selling point that made buy a Corsair. I was hoping to get a PSU that was silent with the fan turned completely off during system idle or web browsing. On both HX850 Gold I have owned so far I instead find that the fan is ramping up once every 15-20 min to cool it down, at system IDLE! This is so completely and utterly irritating in an otherwise nearly inaudible system since the fan, when it kicks in, first ramps up to 100% before it gradually slows down and eventually turns off. The whole process takes about 20-25 seconds, and this goes in cycles, on and on and on and on... The PSU is the single most noisy component in my system during that time and I actually hear it two rooms away from the computer in my apartment, without even trying to. My computer case is the Silverstone Fortress 02, which is one of the best ventilated high end computer cases currently on the market... the one with the three 180 mm Silverstone "air penetrator" fans in the bottom of the case and the PSU mounted 90 degrees tilted from "normal" in a "hanging from the roof" position to make better use of natural thermodynamics, e.g. the PSU's air outlet stream is directed upwards and out (intake is from outside), instead of sideways and out the back. Ambient room temperature is 23-24 degrees Celsius.
In hindsight I realize that a non ball-bearing fan of good quality rotating at a constant low rpm at system idle would have been significantly less sonically intrusive (near to inaudible), than this constant cycling on and off and ramping up to 100% of a ball-bearing fan.
My question to Corsair tech support is this. Is this fan controller issue something Corsair is aware of? For a PSU that is marketed as being "nearly silent". And can we possibly expect an update to firmware, perhaps? Is there firmware on a PSU being able to update / change the parameters of at all?
I am not particularly keen on requesting a second RMA, only to find out, in all likelihood, the third HX850 I mount in my case having the exact same issues as the first two. I rather, if possible return it and have my money reimbursed so I can chose a PSU from another manufacturer. Or I'll go nuts and end up ripping it apart to replace the fan with one of better quality and using an external fan controller, breaking warranty in the process. It's that annoying.
/Disappointed
