How will I know or how can I tell if my psu is causing audio noise inside my
computer? I paid $50 for my psu and it has 5 female molex connectors. It
also has a 3 setting fan control. I would think that this is a good psu.
Well since anyone can just jack up the price of a generic
PSU, especially one with pretty fans and a colored casing,
it doesn't tell us much to mention only "$50".
Make and model of power supply are fairly important bits of
info, far moreso than the *claimed* wattage on it's label as
that too can vary wildly from reality.
Audio noise can come from many places. PSU can contribute,
but ideally (and not uncommonly) the motherboard has a
linear regulation stage prior to the codec chip meant to
clean up any noise, and often it does fair enough at this.
The audio subcircuits could be designed cheaply and omit
this regulation or cut corners for cost or real-estate
reasons to foregoe other filtering or have layout problems.
I assume you are referring to analog, not digital audio
output?
You might go into your windows (or sound card
driver-installed) mixer and try muting, unmuting, and slowly
dragging the volume sliders on all items while unmuted.
There can be some curious and puzzling interactions with
some of these- for example I've seen a board where the MIC
needed UNmuted, bass boost turned off, and the slider set to
approx 1/3 of the way up, with no mic connected, to get rid
of a loud buzzing sound.
If the sound is not continuous, occurs alongside activity of
other PCI devices, you could have another card hogging the
PCI bus, or a poor driver or latency setting. It would be
little use to drift down each of these tangents without a
better idea of exactly what and when this sound occurs, AND
when it does not. For example if it did in game but not
playing wav files in media player from a hard drive.
Onboard audio is comonly more succeptible to analog noise
than most (except maybe very cheap) PCI sound cards. If
nothing else helps then consider getting a (or different)
sound card.
Generally speaking, no, your power supply alone cannot be
blamed for audio noise, even if it was a really bad PSU that
was very noisey itself, your audio circuits should be able
to filter and provide clean output- they are not meant to
run well straight off a switching power supply except for a
rare few amp cards that are very rare, like those with
Class-D amp chips on them. If you had one, you'd probably
know it as that would be a primary feature/spec of it.
