Why coil whine made me sell my PS5 – Reader’s Feature

metro.co.uk:

A reader explains the problem of coil whine and how it got so bad with Horizon Forbidden West that he ended up selling the console.

It’s well over a year since the launch of the PlayStation 5 and while you don’t hear stories about people being desperate for it so much now, it’s still very hard to get hold of. So I felt very lucky when I managed to get one for Christmas. That is until I hit a major problem: coil whine.

If you’re lucky enough not to know what coil whine is it’s pretty straightforward. There’s a coil in the PlayStation 5’s GPU that vibrates the more strain you put on it. So if you’re just on the dashboard, and haven’t got a game open, you won’t hear it. But if you start an intensive game then, if you’re unlucky, you’ll hear a buzzing sound that will get louder the more is going on, on-screen.

I’m sure there’s many PlayStation 5 owners reading this right now who are saying, ‘Well, mine doesn’t make that noise!’ Well, good for you. Mine does. Or rather did. It’s not uncommon either, so it won’t take much googling to find other people complaining about the issue. It’s nothing to do with the fans either, which I understand is also a relatively common issue.

I can only assume it’s the same problem that was much more common, and much louder, on the PlayStation 4. Or at least my one used to howl like a banshee if it tried to play anything more advanced than an indie game. Which is pretty disappointing if that means Sony knew the problem existed for that long and never successfully fixed it (it can also happen with PCs, apparently).

In normal times, with the console easily available, I’d look to replace it, but Sony has made it clear to me that they can’t do that at the moment. They offered to fix it but that will take