Grab a paper towel tube, press one side against your ear and use the other side to locate the source of the sound.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Can it be a fan? I had one of mine making a high pitched noise when running above 90% and I think I fixed that with https://coolercontrol.org/
No, it's not the fan. I have fan curves set up in BIOS and they're running below 700rpm when the system is idle.
A messed up bearing can make a whining sound even with limits set on your fan speeds. I’d open the case and unplug them one at a time (while powered up) just to be sure.
But it doesn't do that in Windows nor in BIOS. I'm pretty sure it's not the fans.
Maybe try a live USB of a different distro? If this ends up being a distro-specific issue, the easiest and simplest way to solve it may be to just use a different distro.
Could be... Worth a try, I guess. Btw the issue occurs in the openSUSE installer, so even before anything runs from either of the nvme disks. That was the first time I heard it and then it persisted on my install.
I get coil whine too but only when playing with local llms and it's actually producing output. Games that also use lots of gpu, no whine. I haven't really looked into fixing it but I'm not sure how one would even go about it
Same for me. Nvidia GPU has some coil whine that is dependent on the framerate in some games (I can "hear" the framerate...)
It's the power draw, i set 94% power limit and coil whine disappears, 95-100% gets increasingly louder
In my case, the GPU was responsible for some coil whine, but only when playing games or running LLMs. Try booting from a live USB with a different desktop environment (kde or gnome) or one that doesn't use GPU acceleration (like xfce, lxde or mate).
If the issue disappears in another environment, it's likely related to the GPU and how the DE uses it.
It might also be other components, so it would be very helpful if you can run the pc while it's open and hear where it's coming from.
I didn't list it, but I don't have a dedicated GPU. I just use the Ryzen iGPU. This is a work machine, it's all I need.
One thing to try may be switching your CPU power profile from power saving to performance (or visa-versa) as this may have an effect on your CPU frequency and therefore the whine.
(I don't know exactly what the power profile is called on openSUSE or how it's managed so I offer it only as a general suggestion to try)
Coil whine can come from your power supply, and it's a fairly common phenomenon with low quality ones. I don't think it has anything to do with your OS, unless maybe some background process is increasing power consumption and triggering the issue.
Use top or some other process monitoring tool to see if there's anything running in the background while you hear it making the noise.
The solution would be to replace the part making the noise, whether that's the PSU or something else. It's ultimately a hardware defect.
Or, it could be the new disk(s), too.
I've never heard of an NVME with coil whine, but maybe they increase power consumption enough to trigger the issue? Or having extra disks in the system triggers some periodic background tasks that increase power usage. If you're on Suse, that likely means you're using Btrfs, which tends to do that.
I'd say it's the opposite. It happens when the system is IDLE, not when it's processing something.