Coil Whine Database: Per-Model Community Census (GPU, PSU, AIO)

By LK Wood IV · Published 2026-08-12 · ~5 min read · St. Louis County, MO

The short version

Coil whine is one of the most-asked PC noise questions with the least data behind it. As of an August 2026 check, no per-model coil whine database existed anywhere — community knowledge lives in scattered forum threads, plus one lab analysis (hwcooling.net) that measured a 30-card batch once and stopped. Meanwhile “coil whine” draws about 2,900 searches a month and “gpu coil whine” another 1,000 (Google Ads exact match, checked 2026-08-12). This page opens the census that should exist: owner reports of GPUs, PSUs, and AIO pumps on an anchored 0-4 severity scale, published as per-model distributions.

The raw data, schema, and intake all live in the open repository: github.com/iBlessi/coil-whine-db (CC BY 4.0).

Why distributions, never verdicts

The defining fact about coil whine is the design constraint for the whole dataset: it varies unit to unit. The same GPU model ships silent units and screaming units, because the outcome depends on which inductors a particular board received, how they were potted, the PSU feeding them, and the load pattern — not on the model name. A review unit that stays quiet proves nothing about the unit you will receive, and one loud unit on a forum proves nothing about the model.

So the per-model answer is never “the RTX 4090 whines” or “it doesn’t.” It is a distribution: out of n reported units, this share was inaudible, this share was audible at the desk, this share screamed even at idle. That is what this database publishes: the distribution among reported units, not the odds for every unit sold.

The schema

One row = one physical unit an owner listened to. Full machine-readable definitions live in schema.json.

The severity scale (anchored)

Score the unit at its loudest normal state. The anchors are fixed on purpose: changing them would make old and new rows incomparable, so any future anchor change bumps the dataset’s major version instead of quietly redefining the numbers.

How to submit a unit

One report = one physical unit you own or owned, judged by your own ears — not a model you read about. Severity-0 reports (“mine is silent”) are the most valuable rows in the census, because they are the half of the distribution that never shows up in forum threads.

1. No git knowledge needed — fill in the coil whine report issue form. It mirrors the schema field-for-field; a maintainer transcribes accepted reports into the CSV, with submitted_date taken from the issue’s creation date and source_issue set to the issue number.
2. The CSV path — add one row to data/submissions.csv following the schema, and open a pull request. A stdlib validator runs on every PR and blocks malformed rows.

Every submission passes two layers before it lands: the mechanical schema check, and a maintainer review for outlier and troll patterns — duplicate-account bursts filing the same model at the same severity, impossible combinations like a purchase year before the model existed, and rows that summarize other people’s threads instead of a unit the submitter heard. The full acceptance rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

What publishes as the census grows

The activation floor, stated verbatim: per-model n + severity distribution once a model has >=5 reports. Below that floor a model is listed as collecting, with its report count and no severity breakdown. As models cross the floor, their distributions render on this page with n first, then the share of reports at each severity level, always with the sample size in the same breath as the percentages.

The census opened at 0 rows by design. A dataset about unit-to-unit variance cannot be seeded from published reviews, because each review describes a single unit that is not ours to report. Every row is a real owner reporting a real unit.

Where the census stands

As of September 26, 2026, the census holds 47 reports from 40 graphics cards and 7 power supplies, spread across 44 models. Nobody has reported an AIO pump yet. No model has reached five reports, so every model in the tables below is still collecting, with no severity breakdown. One model has three reports and another has two. The rest have one.

Readers filed 51 reports through the issue form between September 1 and 23, and I transcribed 46 of them. One repeated a card that was already on file. On September 15 I asked eight of the submitters one question each, and two answered within the hour. The owner of #48 agreed to a 3, the score for its loudest state above 1,000 fps, and the owner of #50 confirmed a 2 under gaming load. Three more answered by the next day, and two of those went in on September 26. #11 is a Corsair SF450, not the SF540 the form first said. #24 settled on a 3, which makes it the third MERC 319 on file. The owner of #37 named two different Sapphire lines, so that card needs one more check. #52, filed on September 23, went in at a 2.

Four need one more detail from the person who filed them. Two of those give two different severities for the same unit, one may be fan noise, and one needs its model line confirmed. Each row names its issue in the CSV’s source_issue column, and the Issues links below open the original reports.

Report #1 is still my own ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC. It scores 1, audible only in uncapped game menus and silenced by any frame cap, and it is the same physical card behind the Astral 5080 bench dataset.

Graphics cards (40 reports, 37 models)

Power supplies (7 reports, 7 models)

The verdict rules

• No verdicts below n = 5. A model with three angry reports is collecting, not “a whiner.”
• Reports are self-selected. Annoyed owners may be more likely to submit a report, but the size and direction of the resulting bias are not measured here. A reported whine percentage is neither a population estimate nor a guaranteed upper bound. Reports of silent units add useful observations; they do not make the sample representative. The five-report publication threshold does not change that limit.
• Anchors never drift. The 0–4 scale above is frozen; a change would be a new major version, and old rows would be marked as scored on the old scale.

Use the data (CC BY 4.0)

The live dataset is one file: data/submissions.csv — one row per reported unit, in the schema order above. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Attribute as “TechFuelHQ Community Coil Whine Census” linking to this page.

If the noise is bothering you today, the diagnosis and mitigation walkthrough is the coil whine guide: is it normal, and where is it coming from? — and a brand-new buzz paired with crashes belongs in the PSU failure symptoms guide rather than a census form. If capping FPS quiets your card and you want the deeper fix, the GPU undervolt settings database is the companion dataset. The GPU sag census is the sibling census. Same rules, other thing a heavy card does.

Change log

• 0.1.0 (2026-08-12) — schema, anchored severity scale, intake (issue form + PR path), validator, and the empty census opened: 0 rows, no seeded data.
• 0.1.1 (2026-08-13) — first accepted report: the maintainer’s own Astral RTX 5080 OC via the issue-form flow (issue #1 -> validated row). n=1; every model remains below the n>=5 distribution floor.
• 0.2.0 (2026-09-14): 41 reader reports from issues #2 to #51 transcribed, for 42 rows across 40 models. No model has reached n>=5. The CSV gains an optional source_issue column naming the issue each row came from.
• 0.2.1 (2026-09-15): two reports held for a clarifying question are transcribed after their submitters answered, #48 at severity 3 and #50 at severity 2, for 44 rows across 42 models. Six reports still wait on an answer. No model has reached n>=5.
• 0.2.2 (2026-09-26): three reports go in, for 47 rows across 44 models. #11 and #24 are transcribed after their submitters answered the clarifying question, #11 at severity 0 and #24 at severity 3, and #52 went in at severity 2. #37 named two Sapphire lines and waits on one more detail, as #2, #16 and #17 still wait on an answer. No model has reached n>=5.