Noise coming from HDD or CPU in headphones

Question

I hear weird high sounds coming from my headphones. It is obvious that it has something to do with HDD or CPU because it's highlight sounds are heard when I it is writing data on HDD but also many other things like mouse moving etc.

Here is a demonstration of such noise. It's not very audible during idle, but much more so during a small FFT test in Prime95. The processing of the mouse position or HDD access also have correlated noises.

Does anybody knows what it could be and how to avoid that noise?

Answer 1

I've had this problem in older computers when using the on-board audio, and also know what the movement of the mouse or a file read sounds like. The problem is some sort of electrical noise that leaks into the sound outputs.

Newer motherboards have seemed to solve this problem (I assume by using higher quality parts), but rather than replacing your motherboard another solution is to use a dedicated sound card. This can be for PCI, PCIe, or even USB.

If this is not possible, a coping method is to turn down the system volume as much as possible while turning up the application volume all the way.

Possibly related to the problem is something called coil noise. High-end GPUs still suffer from this to varying degrees, and I'll usually return one if I can hear it at my desk. I can always hear it if I open up my computer and put my ear next to a GPU while its under load.