Asklemmy

43940 readers

546 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

398

Do you often hear the ringing of switching power supplies and devices when you are in a quiet space? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

149 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm curious, how many people are aware of these sounds. I have designed, etched, and built my own switching power supplies along with winding my own transformers. I am aware of the source of the noise. So, does anyone else hear these high frequency sounds regularly?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] insomniac_lemon@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Even past 30 and with (mild) tinnitus, yeah my hearing is still great so I'm going to hear it. Light bulbs, chargers, the router etc.

Recently my computer's PSU has started randomly buzzing a not-quite-high frequency. It could be age (it's from 2019) though I'm pretty sure it's some kind of interference because sometimes it won't make any noise at all for days and I'm pretty sure my light bulb (an LED filament bulb which doesn't have much in the way of components) seems to also make different pitches of buzzing that coordinates with how much my computer PSU will buzz.

Anyways it bothers me, so as soon as I post this I'm going to power-down and unplug my computer and switch to a different device for the next day or so.

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The switching frequency is usually set by a small capacitor that is on the mains auxiliary power circuit. This may degrade depending on what kind of capacitor was used. There is also a small electrolytic capacitor that smooths the auxiliary power for the chip itself. If this capacitor degrades too much, it can cause some switching frequency stability issues too.

My current laptop supply sounds about like R2D2 when my GPU is running full tilt and I'm maxed out on 18 of 20 cores with AI.

[–] insomniac_lemon@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

My current laptop supply sounds about like R2D2 when my GPU is running full tilt and I’m maxed out on 18 of 20 cores with AI.

But that's the thing it happens at idle, and I've tried fixing it by unplugging+discharging and letting it sit unpowered in my colder-than-average room for 5 hours or so and it was still happening when I booted back up. So time or some other random thing seems to be a bigger difference.

When I had it not happen for days, doing anything that made the fans ramp up didn't cause it to happen (even full tilt as you said). In fact most of the time it'd start with nothing open other than the browser.

I thought it might've been dust (despite my PSU being the least dusty component) but after dusting it doesn't seem to have been the issue.