Facing a strange problem

[Manish Jain]

Hi,

I am facing a strange situation on my FreeBSD (10.3 amd64) box - some very 
subtle hardware problem which I cannot determine what and which is causing me
a lot of grief.

I recently upgraded my motherboard, CPU and DDR RAM because the previous 
hardware was making a lot of high-pitched noise. After installing the new 
MB + CPU + CPU fan RAM, the high-pitched noise (which resembles a bad 
bearing turning furiously) has not gone away. The pitch has changed, but there
is an incessant noise which becomes pretty irritating after some time sitting 
next to the PC.

The noise is most pronounced as I hover and move among the categories in 
the gnome3 Applications menu. I have no idea whether this has anything to do 
with Radeon HD 8470D onboard graphics chip, which is currently unsupported 
on FreeBSD and has to be driven with the vesa driver. But it is a 
possibility because, as far as I remember, the noise was not present when 
I was running Windows XP with the correct official graphics driver. If the 
noise is related to graphics, then quite likely the source would be the 
RAM modules - my system's video RAM comes from the main RAM.

Other possibilities include the power supply unit and the cables. I am 
currently ruling out the MB, CPU and CPU fan because all of them are brand 
new. I suppose the hard disk can also be ruled out it is a solid state 
disk purchased just 2 months back. Except for the mouse, all USB devices 
too can be ruled too because I disconnected all USB peripherals (bar 
the mouse, for which I changed the port from backside to front) and the 
noise keeps coming unabated.

Anyone who can help my identify the root cause would do an immense favour. 
Short of buying a new computer, I am perfectly willing to spend some money 
for new hardware that could put a fullstop to this messy noise. If the 
noise is deemed to be from RAM, would installing a separate graphics card 
solve the issue ? Suggestions are most welcome.

Thanks for any help.
Manish Jain