I have been facing extremely annoying problems with noise from the motherboard since I first upgraded my system late last year. Here are the specs, for context:
i7 8700K @ 4.8GHz on air. ~60C under max load.
ASUS Z370 TUF PRO
16GB 3200MHz Corsair Dominator DDR4 RAM
EVGA GTX 1070 FE (stock clocks)
EVGA Supernova 650W PSU
ABWB Combo WiFi/BT PCIe card
This is an ultra-quiet build with Noctua cooling, so you really can't hear the fans when it's running, but doing certain things in the OS will trigger horrible component noise. Not the fairly constant screaming you may have heard from a bad GPU, but the distinct sound of "data" (akin to dial-up sounds).
One of the worst offenders is Logic Pro X, which pegs the CPU at max clock and sits there making noise even when doing nothing at all. When I first spotted this quirk I put my overclock to blame and disabled it. Still noisy. I've tried disabling turbo mode, changing various power settings in UEFI, removing my wireless PCIe card, switching the whole machine to another case; everything I try leaves me with the same infuriating whistle. I have even had my hearing checked (it turns out I am hypersensitive to certain frequencies, which might be making things worse, but a friend's ears verified that most adults would be bothered by the sound) and tested for CO in my house.
I have tested multiple apps that are hard on the CPU (Blender, Adobe Premiere, Prime95, compiling huge Xcode projects, etc) and nothing reliably prompts the noise. LPX is the only software the consistently makes my mobo do its best impression of George Pettit.
The noise also starts up whenever the ethernet gets used. While watching Netflix with the audio muted you can hear each packet of video data streaming in as you go. Using WiFi only makes the sounds disappear.
Soon I was sure it was VRM or motherboard component problems, as I had troubleshot with a different PSU and GPU. I read some horror stories about the 300 series boards online so chalked it up to bad luck. I RMA'd my first board and hoped the second would be better. Nope. Still noisy. I even tried buying two more different motherboards of different makes and models and I still had horrible coil noise.
Eventually I got really mad and decided to install Windows to see if it was MacOS causing my setup to sing the song of its people.
Bingo.
The noise is gone. Not a murmur to be heard. Running Linux off a live USB verified the hypothesis. Clearly there is something in the hardware/Clover settings that I have for OSX causing these problems to arise.
This is basically a plea for someone to save me from this madness. I must be missing something basic and obvious. I call myself a competent Hackintosher (have been fiddling since Leopard) but I have spent all the energy and knowledge I can spare on this, to no avail.
I love MacOS and always have but at present I simply cannot use it for audio-sensitive work, which is destroying my creative workflow.
Please send help.
Sincerely, PowerMac G4
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