4 RTX 2080ti with drivers 418 produce repeated low beep when running GPU at 100%.

Hello,

We are building a workstation that uses 4 RTX 2080ti. When running some tests using the software GPU Burn ( GitHub - knorth55/gpu-burn: Forked version to run on CUDA9 and 10 or original version GitHub - wilicc/gpu-burn: Multi-GPU CUDA stress test ) to push the GPU to 100% in order to do some temperature and sound tests, we noticed some repeated beeps coming from the GPU.

I tried to investigate by checking the system logs but could not find any error and gpu_burn does not report any error. All the work is done successfully (GPU running at 100% without any crash).

The system used is Ubuntu 18.04.2, up-to-date with NVidia drivers 418 and CUDA 10.0 installed from Nvidia’ repository.
The kernel is 5.0.0-17-generic provided by the linux-generic-hwe-18.04-edge package.
The graphic chipsets are all RTX 2080 ti Turing : tu102, using PALIT GeForce RTX™ 2080 Ti GamingPro OC.

The sound is a high-pitched beep, but in a low volume that repeat every second like a wave. All cards seems to be beeping at the same time, so it is hard to define which one is beeping exactly. However, it seems that all 4 cards are beeping continuously.
The sound disappears as soon as we stop the software and the GPU is no longer running at 100% (goes back to 0% with low work and normal state).
The issue happens both when running the program from gnome-shell’ terminal and from a TTY without any X server started.
I was not able to run startx -- -logverbose 6 as requested (no idea how to run gnome this way).

Also, if NVidia as any software/benchmarking tool it recommends for pushing the GPU to its maximum, I’d prefer to use it rather than a soft on Github. However, I was not able to find anything like this on the website (whether it is in a docker image of as a independent software).

Best regards,
– Gauthier

nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (2.7 MB)

That rather sounds like the mainboard’s temperature warning. At least I wouldn’t know about any acoustic features of nvidia graphics cards.
Check the system temperature using ‘sensors’, make sure you connected the additional 8p+6p mainboard power connectors, make sure airflow inside the casing is sufficient.

I will investigate your suggestion.

Do you have any doc that list the sounds that may be produced by GPUs or can you confirm that GPUs do not produce any sounds? My coworker suggested that the sounds comes from the GPU core.
Also, when running in a TTY, the sound was not synchronised.

To my best knowledge, gpus shouldn’t produce any sound. There’s only the known side-effect of ‘coil whine’, check on youtube if that’s what you’re hearing.

Thank you, this indeed seems to be the issue. Thank you for your answers!