Coil whine. It's long been the bane of graphics cards and judging from the reaction on many forums the current darlings of NVIDIA's lineup, the GTX 970 and GTX 980, may suffer from the same nagging issue as previous Radeon and GeForce products. Multiple posts and retailer feedback sections show a number of coil noise complaints but how widespread is it? There are plenty of frustrated, vocal folks out there who spent plenty of money for a brand new GPU and have been beset by high electrical noise footprints.

Before we continue too far down this path, it's important to discuss coil whine from a slightly less emotional perspective. It typically happens when a high amount of stress is put on the PWM, causing the inductors to vibrate within their housings. Many companies have begun to combat so-called coil whine with measures that include but are not limited to concrete-core chokes and isolated inductor housings.

Typically those upgrades are present on higher-end products that cost a premium while reference-based examples are more likely to have baseline components. However, based on our testing (more on this below) less expensive cards seem to be no more susceptible to this phenomenon than many of their expensive siblings.