Thinkpads Forum

Why do all thinkpads (maybe laptops?) make this high pitched.. annoying as all hell noise mainly when on battery power? Your sititng in a quiet room .. and it's like this high pitch screech that goes up, down, pulsing,... it is so distracting. Currently now have a t61.. and it's singing to me.
Anyone know why? Anyone do anything about it, or just live with it? Its not the biggest deal but today I figured I'd ask

Three options to solve the problem:
1. Update BIOS to the latest version. This may or may not help.
2. Plug in AC if you don't carry your laptop and walk arround.
3. If you have to carry your laptop and walk arround, then go to BIOS and disable automatic power saving feature. Well, you will of course lose some battery life. That is exactly the reason that causes noise when on battery. Intel should be blamed, not Thinkpad or Lenovo.

thanks!

Yeah. Also, I read a thread when I first noticed the problem that many Intel Core 2 Duo processors have this high pitched noise. Turning off the CPU deeper sleep or the whatever the power saving feature is via BIOS should help. However, I've noticed that the high pitched sound is still there when running on battery power and using graphics intensive applications such as Google Earth, playing games, and the like. Intel is definitely to blame for this.

Could anyone explain to me how the heck a cpu (a chip) could generate any high pitched noise

Thanks

Marin

Here are some links:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=179586

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthr ... light=hiss

I believe I have already seen these, but they don´t really explain anything. I don´t think it´s possible to base such a statement on what some users seem to believe to be a reason for this "phenomenon". I have no doubt about its existence, just the reasoning seems to me somewhat questionable...

Thanks,

Marin


PS: Just to make clear, I don´t want to steal the thread, I´ve been actually following the "issue" for some time now.

Marin85 wrote:I believe I have already seen these, but they don´t really explain anything. I don´t think it´s possible to base such a statement on what some users seem to believe to be a reason for this "phenomenon". I have no doubt about its existence, just the reasoning seems to me somewhat questionable...

Thanks,

Marin


PS: Just to make clear, I don´t want to steal the thread, I´ve been actually following the "issue" for some time now.

Well... Actually, the processor is not to blame for this (yeah, maybe a little, but not at all that much). The reasons could be million, but the main one is here DC/DC converters on mainboard and adapter. DC/DC converters often produce high pitch noise when working in so-called Discontinuous Conduction Mode (DCM), especially bad ones, while some (depending on the working frequency of the switching MOSFETs) even scream in Continuous Conduction Mode (CCM). The actual explanation of DCM and CCM are much too big for this thread and would require the knowledge of Power Electronics, so let's just say that DCM is a mode in which DC/DC converter should not work that well.
You can easily hear whether the converter is in DCM or CCM (as I said, there's one in the adapter, and a few on the mainboard). Just put your adapter to your ear with it plugged in both the laptop and AC. You'll hear some noise that it makes in CCM. Then unplug your laptop from the adapter - you'll "hear the sound" of DCM - a lot of noise, but coherent to some point. For the deep DCM, unplug the AC and you'll hear the totally uncoherent noise from DC/DC trying to keep the output voltage at 20v and thus discharging all the capacitors and inductors within. You can hear different noise from the old ThinkPad (16v) adapter - I like it better
So, hate to tell you but it's probably not Intel to blame - IBM's engineers are the ones that designed the board along with DC/DC converters. You can take a look at the T4x or R5x boards (near the battery connector) - IBM used Toshiba and Fairchild MOSFETs - depending on what they had at the time (I have a nice pretty T40 board that has both). Fairchilds are somewhat better with the noise, but are more prone to die.
Anyway - it's just stupid to blame it all on Intel because Intel's not to blame for everything. Oh and yeah... clock frequencies that processors use are in ~GHz range so they can't possibly produce high pitch noise. What produces noise is the processor DC/DC converter that is used to step down the standard chipset voltage (~2-3v) to processor one (~1.2v). The frequencies that DC/DC switches use are exactly in the upper domain of the human ear (~20kHz) and you can hear even when they change - from Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) that is used to reduce the power amount that system needs. One more thing using PWM are PC speakers - sounds familiar?
Also, in one of the links from the above (the one with the T61 pictures) you can clearly see the MOSFETs of the CPU DC/DC converter along with one inductor. They are named TPCxxxx and are the noise prone Toshibas that I'm telling you about. So, one more minus to the IBM/Lenovo...

I love this board for such posts. Thanks man for this insightful description!

@jimmy273: Dude, thanks for the detailed reply I suspected that this noise could come from a converter and at least I now know for sure that is can´t be the cpu itself. Shame on Intel that we can´t blame them for everything...

Marin

Marin85 wrote:@jimmy273: Dude, thanks for the detailed reply I suspected that this noise could come from a converter and at least I now know for sure that is can´t be the cpu itself. Shame on Intel that we can´t blame them for everything...

Marin

I hear ya man... Ever since the whole Centrino idiocy I've been waiting to stab some backs in Intel. Anyway, I did A LOT of fixing/soldering on these boards, and I have the needed academic background so I just wanted to clarify some stuff.
Besides, I haven't been active thinkpads.com member for over a year now - I have to tell a big story or two

Yeah, tnx buddy. People like you make this a great forum.

I have this problem too,

I will try to fix it assuming that, its Core 2 Duo problem. There were a couple of posts around, wherey people are saying that they solved it by tweaking some parametrs of CPU. i will post the results

There are two ways to shutdown the cpu whining (sound that comes when changing from energy saving cpu c3 state to more energy saving cpu c4 state) with the program rmclock:

1. rmclock > Advanced CPU settings > Chipset > disable both "Enable Popup Mode" and "Enable Popdown Mode".
2. Alternatively rmclock > Advanced CPU settings > Chipset > enable "Disable C4 Mode"

crazyfrog wrote:Three options to solve the problem:
1. Update BIOS to the latest version. This may or may not help.
2. Plug in AC if you don't carry your laptop and walk arround.
3. If you have to carry your laptop and walk arround, then go to BIOS and disable automatic power saving feature. Well, you will of course lose some battery life. That is exactly the reason that causes noise when on battery. Intel should be blamed, not Thinkpad or Lenovo.

Thanks for the advice..
My brand new R500 was whistling as a mouse...
just bought one now.
It whined when on batteries.
Became a bit more silent, when I used Think vantage utilities to change to some "high performance " profile, that is, one that does not save energy.
I suspect, maybe it changes the bios setting..I dont know if that is possible. while there is a Windows session.
Anyway, it seems advice 3 below worked best.
I will use the machine as a desktop replacement, no need to use that feature.
Thanks anyway, I was pretty scared and disappointed, |I would not want to be coping with this permanently. I do work at nights and these things annoy me.
thanks, alex

elvair wrote:There are two ways to shutdown the cpu whining (sound that comes when changing from energy saving cpu c3 state to more energy saving cpu c4 state) with the program rmclock

pls what is the rmclock program? thanks

are there any advantages to using the mclock trick, with the different states, etc, C4, as opposed to stopping the energy saving completely, thanks

- I googled the rmclock, it does not yet seem to support win7..I will see. thanks

I had problems with that noise when using Windows power management (just after a fresh OS install). The noise reduced considerably after installing all the Lenovo power management drivers AND power manager software.

Just to remind everybody the biggest noise source in any laptop after fan noise , is for sure
hard disk noise it is high pitched and totally dominates any other noise source (fan aside).
so if possible have all noise reduction features of your HD active, or use an SSD which is almost soundless.

any advice how to just keep the hdd stopped as long as possible? word, or PPT working at night should be ok just on RAM isnt it? does switching paging file off help? no need to use hdd as RAM...with so much memory

You could take a look how much ram is used in windows.

Increase RAM or buy a ssd. I'd buy a ssd, it's a great thing. But you may want to wait as the prices seem to decreise a lot.

I've had the noice since the begining and only today I started to look for other people's comments. After finding this post about the connection with AC power I did some tests and found out that some power profiles do not lead to the noise. Looking a bit further, I found out the single parameter that causes the noise:

in the Power Manager (right-click on the tray battery icon), switch to 'advanced' view, then in the 'Battery settings' column, under 'System settings', change 'Maximum CPU Speed' from 'Highest' to 'Adaptive'. The annoying noise immediately disapears, even on battery with WiFi!