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Alienware 17 makes obnoxious high pitched sound?
I've got an M17x-R4 and love it. I just got in an Alienware 17, and mostly love it so far too...
Except it makes an intermittent very high pitched, completely obnoxious sound. It seems to be coming from the left side of the unit. I *think* it's actually from the fan. Like I don't mind the normal fan noise, it's basically just like my M17x-R4, and I don't even mind it much at full blast. It's not THAT loud, and not very annoying.
But this high pitched sound, while quieter, is just completely obnoxious to me, and my R4 doesn't do anything like it. It SEEMS like it starts and goes up and down when the fan kicks in at it's lowest level, and isn't there when the fan is totally quiet (don't know if it's actually stopped, but when the notebook is otherwise dead silent the squeal is gone too).
It can't be a hard drive, as I've got 2 SSDs in there. I GUESS it's not that "cpu whine" I've heard about, as unplugging it seems to have zero effect on the noise, and like scrolling around on web pages has no effect. I can't hear it, or at least it's covered over when the fans are clocked up a lot more, but I can hardly run something at full blast just to keep it from squealing lol
Is this normal? Is there anything I can do?
I should note I've already updated the BIOS, etc.
Cerast
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December 19th, 2013 16:00
Seems like we're having the same problem:
http://en.community.dell.com/owners-club/alienware/f/3746/p/19537120/20489689.aspx
Tesla1856
8 Wizard
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December 19th, 2013 17:00
Connect analog headphones (so the internal speakers disconnect and all audio output is redirected).
Now, is it coming from audio-card or the machine parts (fans, etc.) ?
tigerwolf7
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December 19th, 2013 21:00
Very interesting. Can you tell where in the system it's coming from? Mine's the left side, and it's intermittent. I actually think mine IS the fan (I guess the CPU fan is on the left?) as I hear a click sort of a second before it starts...I hear another fan in there though that just sounds normal.
I just noticed something else...CPU-Z is reporting that my CPU is stuck at really high clock speeds, well over 3GHz, sometimes almost 4, doing nothing.
Does CPU-Z not work on Haswell? I finally installed Intel's Turbo Boost Monitor, and IT seems to show my CPUs as barely running, as they should be, but booth CPU-Z, and Windows built in Task Manager are reporting crazy 3.6-ish GHz speeds all the time (bouncy around that).
I THINK it was actually reporting mostly 1GHz or lower speeds until I installed the Ethernet drivers, so I wonder if it's something to do with that. I really don't want those "Killer" things as I don't like having extra fancy drivers like that for no reason, and I know it doesn't benefit me at all (if it benefits anyone...) Hmm, it could be that it was installing the new BIOS that made Windows/CPU-Z start misreporting the CPU speed as I would have done them around the same time.
tigerwolf7
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December 19th, 2013 22:00
Darn, I actually got some audio of this recorded on my iphone, but I'm not sure how to post it anywhere. Surprisingly it came out pretty well, you can clearly hear it.