Title says it all.

I notice that when I'm pausing the game, or in a loading screen, my graphics card makes this horrible coil whine/screeching noise, then when the game loads it sorts of settles down. I also notice that when I play constantly, my card gradually gets louder. Is Skyrim caching too much stuff and putting stress on the card?

I think the coil whine may be because of the loading screens having an uncapped framerate. Any way I could fix this?

I have a MSI Twin Frozr 560 Ti, and its usually quiet. However, when I got BF3 and downloaded the new Nvidia drivers that released in October...it seems my card has taken a turn for the worst.

I think I may have a combination of things. My card may be messed up with drivers or with some sort of physical damage, and Skyrim's caching and uncapped loading screens are causing even more coil whine and noise.

What should I do?

really I have never heard of uncapped frames wrecking hardware, but alot of people swear it happens, if you are concerned just download a fps capper... Shoot fraps will do it if you tell it to and just run it in the background...

When is the last time you did a proper gpu driver sweep and install? If you think it is framerate, apply a limiter (I see latest nvidia Inspector has fps limiter in it...or get FPS limiter mod at nexus). But your noise sounds like more than a launching fan...I'd be reducing graphic settings, and downclocking my card.

The thing is...I installed the new drivers on top of the old ones. I thought you didn't have to worry about doing fresh installs with drivers anymore, and the unused parts would be removed.

My PC has ran Witcher 2 on High, Crysis 2 on High, and BF3 on High. I think its capability isn't a question.

That's not how memory works. If it was caching too much stuff the video card would run out of memory, which would take stress off it as it would spend time waiting for the system bus to re-send the things that had to be evicted from its own RAM.

Force vsync on? The inventory/Esc screens seem to copy the current view into a temporary texture and then use that (via a zoom blur shader) as the background, removing the usual CPU bottleneck completely and potentially making the framerate (and GPU load) super high. I don't think a card should mind running at 60 FPS, though.

And yes, some badly engineered cards did break back when StarCraft II's menu had no frame limiter and actually made the cards run at 100%. Any sane driver/hardware combo would just throttle a card, but Blizzard got blamed for it anyway.

Doesn't Skyrim have vsync enabled to begin with?

unless you disable it yes, though one patch did turn it off. If its on your fps are not going over 60.

More stress will increase heat which will kick the fans into higher gear. I just set my fans to 100% in game all the time and it becomes background noise.

I also use TESVAL and AntiFREEZE to cap framerate to 35 on ultra and its smooth as silk.

You think uninstalling the latest drivers and doing a sweep, then installing them fresh would try and solve anything?

I know for sure, my PC didn't have a noise issue before I downloaded the Nvidia drivers in October.

Couldn't hurt I guess, I've had to do it with ATI drivers but, thats ATI for you. Other things to consider.

Fans can become dirty making them work harder or trapped dirt can cause a weird noise, a game patch could of tweaked things around causing more stress. HQ Texture mods will increase stress. Switching from MSI to Stock drivers might have changed default fan speed making you notice the switch up. New driver profiles can change setting making the fans kick in. Also depending on weather where you are if you starting using the heating then that would cause fans to kick in sooner if only a degree hotter in the room.

Ahhh, this is so frustrating. I got really sensitive ears and I was so happy I bought a Twin Frozr because it was such a quiet and powerful card.

I'll try wiping my drivers and reinstalling to see if that works. If that fails...should I contact MSI for an RMA?

The card is increasingly noisy otherwise as of recently. I can hear a constant grinding or humming noise when my PC is idle, too.

When I play BF3, the card just goes ballistic.

If we are talking a grinding rather than a whirring up then yes contact them that's never a good sign. MSI support are pretty good. Also I believe (don't quote me) MSI have a step up program for 6 months might get an even better card for the initial price difference out of it.

Okay. I'll try all these things. Thank you so much for your input.

I see you are an Invader Zim fan...that makes you even cooler.

I don't know what the forum rules are when it comes to this, but I'll post tomorrow with the results!

When you are uninstalling the nvidia drivers, make sure you use the step procedure (it is perfect, http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=169555 )...need driversweeper, (I use ccleaner also), and a safeboot. If you don't use this method and just "uninstall", you might as well do nothing...this method is the only way to truly clean out old drivers, and YES you still have to do this with drivers sadly.