How to Stop Your CPU From Making High-Pitched Noises

Published in

Mitch Talmadge

4 min readMar 6, 2016

Recently I noticed a high-pitched noise coming from my computer. It was a pulsating noise which lasted for less than half a second and occurred every second. My first thought was that this noise was coming from one of the fans in my computer, but I found that odd because all of my fans are brand new. After finally going crazy from the annoying noise, I opened the case of my computer to try to find the source of it. I found that the noise was, surprisingly, coming from the CPU!

I don’t know how it was making the noise (do electrons scream?), but I found out why. As it turns out, the source of the problem was that the CPU was being placed into an “idle” mode by Windows. In this tutorial I will show you how to disable the idle mode of your CPU, which instantly made the noise go away for me, permanently.

TL;DR:

Open regedit
Navigate to this path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ PowerSettings \ 54533251–82be-4824–96c1–47b60b740d00 \ 5d76a2ca-e8c0–402f-a133–2158492d58ad

Change Attributes from 1 to 0
In Windows’ Power Settings, change the advanced settings of your plan, find Processor power management -> Processor idle disable, and set it to Disable Idle. The noise should disappear after hitting OK.

In-Depth:

Step 1 — Open Regedit

This is easy enough. Make sure you’re running as an Administrator, push Windows + R on your keyboard, and type in regedit. Push Enter and regedit should open.

Step 2 — Navigate within regedit

Pay close attention to the names in this step. Now that regedit is open, you need to navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Control \ Power \ PowerSettings \ 54533251–82be-4824–96c1–47b60b740d00 \ 5d76a2ca-e8c0–402f-a133–2158492d58ad

Make sure to click on the name of the last key (5d76a2ca-e8c0–402f-a133–2158492d58ad) — not the arrow to the left of it. You should now be able to see a REG_DWORD value on the right side of regedit called Attributes.

Step 3 — Change Attributes Value

Right click on the Attributes value, and select Modify… Change Value Data to 0, and click OK. You can now close regedit.

Step 4 — Change Windows Power Settings

Now we need to change the power settings of Windows so that your CPU doesn’t idle. Open the run dialog again using Windows + R. This time, type powercfg.cpl and hit Enter.

Windows’ Power Options should now be open. Just follow these steps:

On whichever power plan is selected, click Change plan settings. If you use multiple plans, you can repeat this for each plan.
On the next screen, click Change advanced power settings.
In the window that pops up, find Processor power management, and double click on it.
Find Processor idle disable, and double click on it.
Change the Setting from Enable Idle to Disable Idle
Click OK and the noise should immediately stop.