Vague title I know, but I couldn't think of how to describe it. The other night, the system just hung and at the instant it hung, the audio output gave low end pop and then a bonkers loud high pitch screech. At first whilst diving for the speaker power button thinking the drivers had blown or something whilst our ears bleed. Once the painful noise was subdued I noticed both my mouse and keyboard were unresponsive... Hmmm, hard re-boot and ever since then the machine picks and chooses when it starts. Last weekend I did swap out my GTX280 for a GTX580, but then I spent the whole weekend playing World of Tanks and spanking some renders in Blender. So any ideas what could have happened? One thought of mine could be PSU due to the additional load the GTX580 requires over the GTX280. However before the swap, I had been running the GTX280 and a ATI Firepro V3700 in there for months no worries. Specs! I7 930 Gigabyte X58-USB3 16Gb Kingston (something or other..lol!) EVGA GTX580 Antec Quattro 850W PSU Intel 80Gb SSD Seagate 1Tb SATA HDD Creative X-Fi Music sound card (1st gen) Blu-ray drive Laing DDC-1 Pump 4x 120mm Akasa Ambers 2x 80mm Artic cooling fans Sunbeam RHK-BA fan controller Creative Audigy 2 front panel (headphone amp and jack) I use to be pretty good at this sort of de-bugging but the last 4 years I've pretty much backed off what's current and recently I've been working 18 hour days which means my mind is fogged currently. I did just take delivery of a new workstation at work with a I7 4930K, 32Gb Ram and a Quadro K4000
Last time I can remember having an audio freak-out on me was when a PSU exploded, it would be worth giving it a tear-through and seeing if the PSU is the culprit. Could be the X-FI card, though, I know that those are really temperamental, and can be incredibly sensitive to even the slightest hardware change. (Friend of mine had his start misbehaving because he upgraded to faster RAM modules.)
I had a rig once (I can't remember which) that used to make a funny noise through the sound when I shut it down. It was kinda like a weeeeeee sound. In fact I just remembered which... It was my old Alienware. Had an older type PSU in (92mm fan at the back). I would say it was definitely the PSU causing the sound.
Did windows record anything in the logs? If it was just a Kernal 41 power error then it's useless. As others have said try another PSU. I would try and run with onboard audio for a while and see if it happens again.
I've been looking at grabbing a new PSU for a while, but not this month. I think I've freaked it out and over stressed it with the new GTX580 thrown in there.
An 850W PSU should handle that lot a-ok. Although it's rare it's not unknown for any PSU to just pop. Presumably there's been no further weird noises?
The power draw on a 580GTX is very similar to the 280GTX at stock settings. A quality 500W PSU should be enough for the load.
All my thoughts exactly. Tonight it fired up a ok, but I did notice my mouse reciver that I had recently moved to a port on my monitor had stopped working in that port. Which makes me wonder what the hell is going on. Duff internal hub on my Viewsonic VP201b, over loading the USB port on my motherboard?
used to have this on DX2 when a game crashed, just needed to reload windows to fix it. Though that would happen to any sound card with an external power connector (connect directly to PSU). As windows doesnt terminate signals to soundcard well when it crashes. Though since installing windows 8 I have not had this problem.
Starting to dread it might be the sound card... Well I shall see how it goes, and upon the next occurrence it's getting pulled! lol!
So far as I'm aware; looping sound is caused by the Soundcard driver getting something stuck in memory. With the Asus Xonar cards; it only happens when a game itself crashes. Or otherwise something misbehaves. I've had it happen where Skype produces full-volume static on the new message noise, but never random screeching. Could be PSU noise, all of a sudden, but it'd take one hell of a ripple to cause that, or a dud Soundcard driver. I'd test another PSU first. This could be a sign that the PSU is failing badly, and could cook other components if it is causing that much ripple.
