Thinkpads Forum

I keep getting this weird electrical buzzing sound coming from the keyboard of the X301.
Its very feint, but can be heard when you lean close to the keyboard.
Does anyone know what this problem is caused by?
And how to fix it.
It sounds like a low pitch electrical humming, like the sound of a neon light up close.

My X301 has the same issue, but its really very feint -- you have to be in a very quiet room or get your ear really close to the keyboard to hear it. And if the fan comes on, it drowns out the noise. I stopped noticing it, honestly.

So, this is wide spread issue on X301. Good to know.
Does your buzzing get louder when the lid gets closer?
Mine buzz is the loudest, when the lid is almost closed.

I have the same buzzing nose from my X301. I believe it's the sound of the CPU changing back and forth of the power saving C-states, so you could try changing some of the power management settings to disable this I've heard this on other laptops as well, so it's not isolated to the X301.

Tried everything, even tried disabling speed stepping in bios.
Nothing helps, from my research there is nothing that can be done about it.

I always thought it was the SSD back when I used to have an X301.

No it isn't. It's electrical.
I swapped my X301 SSD for a bigger faster one a while back, and it made no difference.

There's 3 sources of noise that I can usually hear on my machine (x201 currently, but also several T6x, T4x).

One is the fan, which is easy to identify by the correlation with hot air coming out. You can either change the fan rpm behaviour or the fan itself and hope it gets better. It seems like most fans (even new ones) have a problem with noisy motors though.

There's the CPU state switching mentioned by Esben, which is more like a click and buzz noise. You can usually hear it when you scroll down pages in firefox with smooth-scrolling enabled and no 2D acceleration enabled. You can change the C-state behaviour in Linux, and possibly windows, but it will eat your battery life quicker.

The third is a high pitch whine/buzz from the LCD inverter card. That one is more or less constant except when the monitor is off. You can test that by setting a really short LCD sleep time in the power settings page and waiting for it to switch off. You can't really fix this except by going with an LED panel.

There is also a 4th (which I doesn't apply to the x301, but I'm including it for reference) and that's the ball bearing noise and seeks from mechanical hard drives. The bb noise is somewhat like a woosh of air, and the seeks are clicks. You can't really remedy this without switching to an SSD.

But really, after the HDD noise is gone, you rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns. It's probably easier just to get a decent pair of sound isolating IEMs and block it out.

This one sounds like an neon light buzzing.
Its not the CPU state change noise which sounds like a kind of chirping.
This is by far the most annoying Thinkpad noise of them all.
Sounds like dying electrical balast.
A low pitched and infinitely annoying.
The moment you plug it in, it dissapears. Very odd.

Kaze22 wrote:Its not the CPU state change noise which sounds like a kind of chirping.
...
The moment you plug it in, it dissapears.

this lends toward it being power related though.

have you tried different power management settings in the BIOS?

Tried everything under the sun, other than replacing the Mobo, but from what I hear every X301 has this issue.
Sounds like a faulty balast for the LCD backlight, but then again, it makes no sense that the sound only comes on when the laptop is on battery.

One of those mysteries that will never be solved. I honestly didn't notice this issue through all the time that I owned this laptop, up until when I went up to visit a friend in the sticks, a while back, and I found myself sitting in an empty room void of all city noise, thats when I heard the buzzing.

It was always there. Then I checked online and found that this issue is common with this laptop. Beats me.