High pitched whine coming from PC

TwistedJester

So for Battlefield 3 I decided to go balls out and do a near-full upgrade of my system. New CPU, MOBO, RAM, GPU, an SSD etc. Only parts I've carried over are the PSU and three hard drives. However I've noticed a faint, high pitched whine coming from my new machine. For the past few days I've been pulling things out to try to troubleshoot this, including all the fans, the video card (I've got onboard to test) and all of the hard drives aside from the SSD. Every time the sound still came back. My guess is there's something up with the motherboard because I haven't had any issues with this power supply in the 3-4 years I've owned it. Is there any way I can be sure it's something up with the motherboard short of asking for a replacement from the manufacturer? Or is my PSU just old and/or not able to handle this new setup?

Another useful piece of information: it only seems to happen when I boot into Windows. I've sat around in the BIOS for ten or so minutes just going over settings and I never notice the sound there. But within a few seconds of getting to the Windows login screen it comes back.

My specs, if it helps at all:
Intel Core i5 2500k w/ Cooler Master Hyper 212+ heatsink
Asus P8Z68-V LE mobo
EVGA SuperClocked GTX 570 1024 MB
8GB G.skill Ripjaw RAM
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD
3 x HDDs of varying sizes
Corsair TX650W PSU

Alecthar

It's inductor coil whine, likely one on your motherboard. It probably doesn't indicate any danger in terms of imminent failure, it's likely your particular voltage usage just happened to resonate with an inductor coil on the motherboard and that resonance causes the high-pitched whine you're hearing. I'd recommend removing the SSD and testing if possible, just to eliminate it as a contributing factor. It does seem odd to me that you aren't hearing any coil whine until the SSD is being utilized to boot into your OS, so I'd definitely try that out before the next step, which would be trying to isolate the coil producing the whine and silencing it with hot glue or paraffin.

TwistedJester

I'll try unplugging my SSD tonight to see if that's the issue, but in the meantime I poked around my motherboard looking for an inductor coil but I wasn't able to actually find any, unless there is some other design that doesn't look like a donut wrapped in copper wire.

Here's a high res image of my motherboard, just for reference.

Also, I'm planning on overclocking at some point so I may fiddle with the voltages in the future. Do you think there's any chance that might help make this go away?

Alecthar

They're usually covered. You might be able to isolate the noise by taking a rolled up piece of paper and using it like a little hearing cone dealie-bobber. It'll help you figure out where exactly on the board it's originating (if it is on the board).

The PSU is a more likely culprit, and like I said, it's not that there's a problem, just an unfortunate confluence of parts that result in a particular voltage usage that resonates with a coil somewhere.

You might try disable C1E in the BIOS, I've had success eliminating whine in the past with that. Keep an eye on the CPU in something like CPU-Z, though, sometimes disabling C1E seems to "lock" the CPU to the stock clocks, which isn't necessarily bad, it's just something to keep in mind if you like Turbo Boost.