I whenever I open google chrome or firefox on my pc I get a really annoying buzzing noise.
I've been trying to pinpoint the noise – I removed all hard drives and swapped them all for new ones. Doesn't seem to be the hard drives. I have an SSD, so I ran only that drive and the noise still existed, so I ran just a normal Sata drive and same problem, still the noise.
Furthermore with the case open, when I listen around the case the nosie seems to be coming from between the processor on the motherboard and the connectors on the motherboard (for things like USB etc.)
I've tried unplugging my USB devices one by one to see if it is that. It's not though.
Here's what I have:
Summary:
Intel Core i5 760
8GB DDR3 Ram
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS
Gigabyte P55A-UD3R motherboard
Do you have any ideas of what could make noise in the computer while chrome is open? Can you make any suggestions for me of what I need to replace??
Best Answer
This is indeed caused by frequently shutting down and waking up the CPU. It is supposed to be silent, but some aging systems will start to buzz especially when running on batteries, this is often due to coil noise in the VR (voltage regulation) circuit caused by loosened coils or dried up capacitors. Consequently the coils physically move slightly and you hear a tiny tick.
Why this only happens in Chrome is because it bumps system timer resolution from a default 50Hz to 1000Hz for the entire duration Chrome is running, that's what is causing the buzz (not to mention greatly reduced battery life). Applications must do it only when needed. I reported a bug a while ago, and for a short period it was resolved, but now it is back again (also see 153139).
On desktop systems the easiest workaround is to disable deep-sleep states (C1, C1E etc) in the BIOS. Laptop BIOSes usually don't provide such settings, for which I have made a workaround tool called nobuzz.