I have an issue on my PC that I can’t seem to see any similar issues of on the forums. I play WoW with the music on and I’ve noticed for a while that it seems to ‘warble’ periodically and it can be quite offputting. It’s not a crackle or a buzz… I can only descibe it as a ‘warbling’ distortion. After doing some testing this evening, it seems to be worse in areas of high CPU load, such as Dornogal. Has anyone else experienced a similar issue? I don’t know that it can be solved by anything other than adding a dedicated soundcard to the PC, but it seems a bit silly, as the PC is not exactly slow:
AMD Ryzen 9 3900X no overclock
32GB RAM
AMD RX7900 XT
OS installed on a Samsung 970 Evo NVME SSD
WoW installed on a WD Blue 2.5" SATA SSD
I do have some addons installed, but disabling all of them makes little difference to performance and no difference to the sound issue.
I realise it’s hard to explain, and I have recorded the issue on a Zoom H2 microphone where it’s quite easy to pick up the problem - I’m just not sure if I’m allowed to post a link to the sound file for download on the forum. If someone can confirm if that’s okay, I’ll add it so you can hear for yourself.
First off, I’m no expert but until an expert replies, can I ask, have you tried putting your PC under high CPU load outside of WoW? I.e. are you 100% sure that it can only happen with WoW and not with anything else?
To me it sounds like ‘coil whine’ which I know from first-hand experience can be a very annoying thing but - here’s the bad news if my speculation is true - it has nothing to do with WoW and can’t really be fixed.
A quick google shows that your CPU might be prone to this. Try searching for “Discussing reports of coil whine with Ryzen 3000 systems” and “Coil whine just an AMD 3000 thing?” as a starting point.
I hope that I am completely wrong and that it’s a different and easily-fixed issue.
Good luck!
EDIT: if you are lucky it might be something easily fixed by disabling Core Boost in your BIOS, as outlined in the post that comes up if you search for “High Pitch Buzzing Noise From Ryzen 9 7900X CPU?” but I don’t even know if that applies to your CPU.
Thanks for the reply I’m fairly sure it isn’t coil whine as the issue is with the sound output from the PC speakers, and not the PC components themselves. I had a 2060 a few years back that had excessive coil whine, so I’m familiar with that sound.
Testing components under load outside of WoW is something I hadn’t thought of, so I tried the following:
My comparison has been against audio recorded in-game by other players and posted on YouTube, so I’m using those videos to listen for the same issue. YouTube compression probably isn’t great for comparison, but the example videos I’m using sound ‘correct’ to me and don’t have the same ‘warbling’ quality present on my PC. Playing the music while running the tests below to listen for any similarities to my in-game issue:
Test 1 - Cinebench R20 single core (5 minute continuous run) - No distortion
Test 2 - Cinebench R15 all core (5 minute continuous run) - No distortion
Test 3 - 3DMark Time Spy Extreme - No distortion
Without being able to recreate the issue through artificial stress tests, I then tried a more natural test using Civ 5 - huge world, late game, ending a turn (very CPU intensive) and that also did not recreate the issue I see in WoW.
My chipset and GPU drivers are up-to-date. OS is up-to-date. Not sure what else to try at this point.
I’m fairly sure it isn’t coil whine as the issue is with the sound output from the PC speakers, and not the PC components themselves. I had a 2060 a few years back that had excessive coil whine, so I’m familiar with that sound.