Guild Wars 2

My boyfriend and I just bought brand new GeForce GTX 970s and have been trying out lots of games at max settings.

When playing Guild Wars 2 however, we hear a static sound coming from around the GPUs. This only happens with Guild Wars 2 running and stops instantly if we alt tab out or close it. We also notice some stutters in fps performance.

Since it’s happening to both of us in the exact same game we are assuming there’s something possibly up with this card type and GW2 specifically. (Doubtful we both got bad cards or something else in our PCs went bad at the same time)

Has anyone else happen to have installed this card or other cards recently and getting a similar issue? Or does anyone know what it could be and if we can fix it?

The problem you are getting it Coil Whine as the card get hotter, its a known issue with the 970’s, here in the UK 1 major company that sells them ( overclockers.co.uk ) has declared this as a defect in the card and will replace any 970 card that suffers from it.

Just Google Nvidia 970 Coil Whine there are 100’s of reported issues with the cards, so its very highly likely that you and your B/F both got defective cards espically if they are both the same make, and both have reference cooling on them, ( IE not gaming edition ones )

The FPS issues are likely down to the GFX drivers not being fully ready for these cards this happens to most Nvidia cards until they are a few months old and they get al the kinks out of the drivers etc,

For a fix I highly suggest you contact the site/store you bought them and complain about the issue, direct them to any one of the sites that report the problem as a fault,

Pretty sure that the 970 isn’t available in a reference design^

Essence Snow.3194:

Pretty sure that the 970 isn’t available in a reference design^

You are correct, they do not seem to be, maybe this is why they suffer from the problems the 980’s don’t, either way the rest of the advice is sound, ill edit my other post to remove ref design info.

Anyway certain models suffer worse than others, Zotac seems to suffer badly from it, some EVGA’s also, Gigabyte/MSI seem to have faired better from what im reading, ( I cannot comment on brands we don’t get in the UK )

The EVGA brand is something to stay away from with the 9xx series so far, this is what we’ve determined over at Overclockers.com. Also, the EVGA cards are reference PCB if you want to stick with reference.

Coil whine is one reason I am thinking of waiting to upgrade, which is too bad since the 970 is a heck of a GPU!

I have read as well that Gigabyte and MSI seem to be doing better.

Any card can suffer from coil whine.

EVGA seem to have bigger problems with it than most, however some MSI 970 G4 owners have also complained about it.

Gigabyte are not immune, my 770 had awful coil whine when it was overclocked.

My new Strix 970 doesn’t – however I don’t recommend purchasing ASUS because if you do have to return something you are going to struggle with them. Sadly, choice was limited in Switzerland as nothing is ever in stock, and when it is prices are badly inflated.

@OP – For reference, my 970 can use DSR 4k and still maintain 60FPS a great deal of the time – provided you turn reflections off, limit the character models and don’t use ultra shadows.

I would suggest if you’ve both overclocked the cards at all to dial it down.