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 honest 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 — odds, never verdicts.

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.
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 no numbers attached. As models cross the floor, their distributions render on this page — 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 opens 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 here will be a real owner reporting a real unit, starting with submission #1.

The honesty rules

• No verdicts below n = 5. A model with three angry reports is collecting, not “a whiner.”
• Self-selection bias is named, not hidden. People annoyed by a noise go looking for a place to report it; people with silent units mostly don’t. Annoyed owners over-report and silent units under-report, so every published whine percentage is a ceiling, not an unbiased estimate. The severity-0 row exists to shrink that bias, not to pretend it away.
• 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.

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.