Annoying noise coming from my motherboard.

[vnf4ultra]

I've been having a strange issue lately with my main computer's motherboard. The board is a chaintech vnf4/ultra, which I've had approximately a year and a half. I've recently been trying out the beta2 of vista, but the strange thing is that in vista my motherboard squeals. It's a strange sound, and very annoying. It isn't a constant sound, but the noise follows a repeating pattern, it's on then off, then on, etc. I'd estimate it "squeals" about once a second. It's loud enough to be heard in the next room, much louder than my fans. It is NOT my fans/hard drive/power supply making the noise. It is the motherboard. I've heard of some boards making noise due to "vibration of the coils," but I've tried touching all the coils and caps to see if the pitch changes, but to no avail. The noise is close to the cpu, but seems to be coming from where the majority of the caps are on the board. Any one know of a way to stop this noise?
It also makes this noise in ubuntu linux, but not in windows xp, unless I print using usb, or do file transfers on usb. Also, I get no noise at all if I don't overclock my cpu, it seems to be affected by the "spread spectrum" setting in the bios. I know some will say that it's "what I get for oc'ing" but I still don't think it should make noise like it is. Any help/input is appreciated.

vnf4ultra

 

[wolfram]

Is the spread spectrum setting enabled or disabled in the BIOS?
If you overclock, that setting should be disabled.

 

[vegasgmc]

Could be a bad capacitor. That makes a high pitched sound. Ive had that twice. One it turned out to be from bad bearings in the hard drive and the other was a bad cap in the power supply. One way to nail down the location is to make a paper cone and put one end to your ear and move the other aroung the inside of the system, like a stethyscope. Also check the chipset fan. They can be really loud and high pitched.

 

[vnf4ultra]

Ok, it's hard to "pinpoint" the sound, but I've marked the general area in my pic.

Spread spectrum is auto disabled if I oc at all, but at stock it's enabled.

Also check the chipset fan

It's definitely not the problem.

Thanks so far, I think I'll mess w/ some bios settings and see if I can draw any conclusions.