Crowdsourcing An Investigation Into Coil Whine

September 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 12 Comments

If you’ve heard the high-pitched whine or buzz from an electronic device when a current-carrying inductor is vibrating, you’ll know how unpleasant it can be. It’s common in all kinds of equipment, but it’s become a particular annoyance of late in hardware like PC power supplies, GPUs, and cooling pumps. There is plenty of hearsay on the web about which parts whine and which don’t, and [Lowell Wood] wants to get to the bottom of it.

To track the issue, [Lowell] has put together the Coil Whine Database. It accepts user reports on hardware, regarding the level at which coil whine is present. A score of 0 is given to a part that is inaudible in a quiet room, with higher scores representing higher sound levels. A part scored at 2 is audible working at a desk with the computer under load; a part scored at 4 is audible even when the machine or device is at idle.

For now, the database is largely empty—[Lowell] has just opened submissions, adding a report on their own ROG Astral RTX 5080 card for good measure. If you want to submit a report on a unit, either silent or noisy, that’s simple enough—just fill in the coil whine report form. Over time, submissions will hopefully grow, and it will be easier to get a good idea of what equipment whines and what is likely to operate silently out of the box.

The database aims to present a guide to what parts whine, and how much, noting that any given population of devices tends to vary. To that end, any given device won’t be reported on publicly until it receives at least 5 reports. To counter bias, reports of silent parts will be weighted higher, since it’s unlikely that people happy with their quiet hardware will be rushing to research this issue or report it to a database. Relevant files to the project are available on GitHub for the curious.

This database could be a great boon to the brigade of PC builders out there who like their machines to be as silent as possible. If that sort of thing appeals to you, it’s probably time you started researching passive cooling as well…

Investigating The S3 Virge’s Reputation As A 3D Decelerator Card

June 5, 2026 by Maya Posch 16 Comments

The special 512x384 mode with S3 card installed. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube) — The special 512×384 mode with S3 card installed. (Credit: Bits und Bolts, YouTube)

Back in 1996 the 3D gaming market on PC was beginning to heat up, with hot new titles like Tomb Raider coming out that year and requiring much more graphics power than what was needed for old titles like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D to experience good graphics. Thus you had to pick some kind of 3D accelerator card to buy. Here a common joke was that of the available options, the S3 Virge GPU was so bad that it was actually worse than running in software rendering, but was this true? Cue [Bits und Bolts]’s investigation to finally put this myth to rest.

On software rendering mode a zippy Pentium 166 would struggle to render at 640×480 resolution, so if you wanted more than 320×240, or really knock down graphical fidelity, you had to get that 3D accelerator card. After combining a P166 with an S3 Virge/DX – a minor update to the original Virge – the Tomb Raider game was first compared while running in 512×384 resolution, which the game offers you with an S3 card installed along with bilinear filtering.

After hitting a capped 30 FPS on that first test, 640×480 was tried and hit a solid 15 FPS with bilinear filtering enabled, but the conclusion is basically that the special 512×384 resolution mode is pretty good. Perhaps the main causes of the myth was the wide variability in quality of the various GPUs using the S3 Virge chip, as well as trying to run at anything other than this special resolution which appears to target the card’s strengths.

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Open Graphics Card Powers Cyberpunk “Laptop”

April 4, 2026 by Tyler August 8 Comments

For once, we can avoid debating in the comments what constitutes a “cyberdeck”, because [LCLDIY] does not refer to his cyberpunk masterpiece as such — he calls it a laptop. Considering the form factor is more like an all-in-one with a built-in laser projection keyboard, that’s arguably an even more controversial label to use, but as stylish this build is, it’s what’s inside it that interests us most.

This would be much easier than the original for our old eyes, especially in the dark.

No, not the cash-register motherboard that serves as the brain, though that has got to be worth some hacker cred. No, it’s the graphics card [LCLDIY] designed to drive 10″ electroluminescent (EL) displays that really has us interested. EL screens have a unique and beautiful glow that many find captivating, but we don’t see them all that often for two reasons. One is price: if you can’t find them surplus, they’re not cheap. The other is driving them, which [LCLDIY]’s project helps with, because the graphics card is open source.

The card is PCI, so you’ll need an adapter to plug it into a modern PCIe slot, or you’d have to redesign the thing. Since this isn’t elegant-engineering-a-day, we know which we’d do. The card is based on the CHIPS65548/5 chip, which means you should be able to find driver support under Linux and Windows. [LCLDIY] seems to be using Windows 2000, but that might just be because it’s all been downhill since then.

If the cyberpunk laptop wasn’t enough inspiration, [LCLDIY] also created a giant-scale Game Boy using the same 10″ screen and DIY graphics card. The soft glow of the EL display is particularly suited to the low-res nature of the retro games, as it’s not entirely unlike a CRT. You can see it in action–both builds!– in videos embedded below.

The last time somebody posted an EL display here, they had to build the driver board for it, too. Continue reading “Open Graphics Card Powers Cyberpunk “Laptop”” →

An ATTiny GPU Fan Controller That Sticks

August 2, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 14 Comments

When your GPU fan goes rogue with an unholy screech, you either shell out for a new one or you go full hacker mode. Well, [ashafq] did the latter. The result is a delightfully nerdy fan controller powered by an ATTiny85 and governed by a DS18B20 temperature sensor. We all know a silent workstation is golden, and there’s no fun in throwing money at an off-the-shelf solution. [ashafq]’s custom build transforms a whiny Radeon RX 550 into a cool, quiet operator. Best of all: it’s built from bits likely already in your junk drawer.

To challenge himself a bit, [ashafq] rolled his own temperature-triggered PWM logic using 1-wire protocol on an ATtiny85, all without libraries or bloated firmware. The fan’s speed only ramps up when the GPU gets toasty, just like it should. It’s efficient and clever, and that makes it a fine hack. The entire system runs off a scavenged 12V fan. He could have used a 3D printer, but decided to stick onto the card with double-sided tape. McGyver would approve.

The results don’t lie: idle temps at 40 °C, load peaking at 60 °C. Quieter than stock, smarter than stock, and way cheaper too. The double-sided tape may not last, but that leaves room for improvement. In case you want to start on it yourself, read the full write-up and feel inspired to build your own. Hackaday.io is ready for the documentation of your take on it.

Modifying fans is a tradition around here. Does it always take a processor? Nope.

C64 Gets A Graphics Upgrade Courtesy Of Your Favorite Piano Manufacturer

October 11, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 38 Comments

The Commodore 64 was quite a machine in its time, though a modern assessment would say that it’s severely lacking in the graphical department. [Vossi] has whipped up a bit of an upgrade for the C64 and C128, in the form of a graphics expansion card running Yamaha hardware.

As you might expect, the expansion is designed to fit neatly into a C64 cartridge slot. The card runs the Yamaha V9958—the video display processor known for its appearance in the MSX2+ computers. In this case, it’s paired with a healthy 128 kB of video RAM so it can really do its thing. The V9958 has an analog RGB output that can be set for PAL or NTSC operation, and can perform at resolutions up to 512×212 or even 512×424 interlaced. Naturally, it needs to be hooked directly up to a compatible screen, like a 1084, or one with SCART input. [Vossi] took the time to create some demos of the chip’s capabilities, drawing various graphics in a way that the C64 couldn’t readily achieve on its own.

It’s a build that almost feels like its from an alternate universe, where Yamaha decided to whip up a third-party graphics upgrade for the C64. That didn’t happen, but stranger team ups have occurred over the years.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

A Dedicated GPU For Your Favorite SBC

May 5, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 35 Comments

The Raspberry Pi is famous for its low cost, versatile and open Linux environment, and plentiful I/O, making it a perfect device not only for its originally-intended educational purposes but for basically every hobbyist from gardeners to roboticists to amateur radio operators. Most builds tend to make use of the GPIO pins which allow easy connections to various peripherals and sensors, but the Pi also supports PCI devices which means that, in theory, it could use a GPU in much the same way that a modern computer would. After plenty of testing and development, [Jeff Geerling] brings us this custom graphics card interface for the Raspberry Pi.

The testing for all of these graphics cards has been done with a Pi Compute Module 4 and the end result is an interface device which looks much like a graphics card itself. It splits the PCI bus out onto a more familiar x16 slot connector and adds physical connections for power, USB, and Ethernet. When plugged into the carrier board, the Compute Module can be attached to any of a number of graphics cards, including the latest and highest-end of Nvidia and AMD offerings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, the 4090 and 7900 cards don’t work with the Raspberry Pi. This is partially due to the 32-bit limitations of the Pi and other memory mapping issues, but even after attempting some workarounds Nvidia’s cards aren’t open-source enough to test properly (although the card is recognized by the Pi) and AMD’s drivers crash the system even after compiling a custom kernel. [Jeff] did find an Nvidia card that worked, although it requires using the USB interface and second-hand cards are selling for around $3000 USD. For a more economical choice there are some other graphics cards that he was eventually able to get working, albeit not with perfect performance, including some of the ones we’ve seen him test already.

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What Kind Of GPU Are You?

July 22, 2021 by Al Williams 9 Comments

In the old days, big computers often had some form of external array processor. The idea is you could load a bunch of numbers into the processor and then do some math operations on all of the numbers in parallel. These days, you are more likely to turn to your graphics card for number crunching support. You’ll usually use some library to help you do that, but things are always better when you understand what’s going on under the hood. That’s why we enjoyed [RasterGrid’s] post on GPU architecture types.

If you can tell the difference between IMR (immediate mode) and TBR (tile-based) rendering this might not be the post for you. But while we knew the terms, we found a lot of interesting detail including some graphics and pseudo code that clarified the key differences.

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