Loud crackling/hissing sound after a while playing

with the following problem it makes no difference if I have sound softwareaudio or -ns enabled, I have tried all the options.

The game has always run fine for me, and has been fine up to half way through Darkshrine league, I stopped playing for a few weeks to take a break before the new league started, upon returning I have a very weird issue that has started.

The game runs fine for a time (sometimes shorter than others), eventually a hissing/crackling starts in my speaker/headphones (whichever I am using) it gets louder and louder till it is ridiculously loud, and my graphic drivers crash, bizzarely it is only POE that does this, no other games, and if I open the passive tree in game it causes it to quieten till it eventually stops.

I have limited the game to 80 FPS, and set a few settings in Nvidia control panel for POE to performance mode etc. and that seemed to cure it, had a decent few hours the other night with it without it happening, but today it is back, I have done a fresh install of newest drivers and still this happens, and only in POE.

Just for info purposes, if I exit the game it stops, but if I leave the game open and alt tab out it persists but fades.

Also in this time I haven't changed anything about my hardware set-up.

Any suggestions? any help at all is greatly appreciated

Sounds like a hardware issue. If you have built-in sound on your motherboard, try using a sound card to see if the problem disappears. Otherwise if you have a sound card, try built in sound. If you're on a laptop, then you hardware troubleshooting is limited.

Also a full DXDIAG report might help.

thanks for the replies :) I shall give trying a sound card a try as I have one somewhere and am currently using onboard sound (HD audio too, so I might try disabling onboard sound before putting a sound card in to try that too)

Edit:- temperature was my first thought, as this was the problem with my old graphic card, since getting this new card I haven't had the problem for a few months (it's a GeForce GTX 750 Ti) and had stopped monitoring it when playing, upon looking it could indeed be this again :(

Kinda annoying that POE taxes graphic cards seemingly so much more than other games, super annoying when I prefer to play POE over other games, I shall experiment with dropping display quality settings over the next few days

updated my edit, seems to be around the 80 degree mark this starts to kick in, like I said, it is a GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and has no problems with temps on other games like Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn on high settings, might be back to playing with low settings just to play :( shame as for me this lowers the gaming experience a little.

What to try (if the temps Drakier requested are high)...

Run the game at lowest graphics settings, and make sure your vertical sync is enabled. The lower settings will put less stress on the GPU and the overall system temps, and the vsync will make sure you're not rendering more frames than you need at any one point in time.

If that reduces temps significantly, you probably just need to clean out your PC, clean the fans, clean the filters (if applicable), and tidy up cables to make for better airflow. If the lower settings doesn't help, you might have a failing GPU or CPU. By failing I mean one that's either burning larger traces or having currents along its traces jump to nearby traces.

Also undo any overclocks.

Reasons for increased system temps as systems age...

1.) Dust. Don't undervalue what a good cleaning can do for PC temps.

2.) You've moved the PC to an area that doesn't get enough air flow

3.) You've upgraded the hardware recently, or added more hardware.

4.) Capacitor aging: when capacitors lose efficiency, other components of a regulated system will work harder to keep up with the same voltage demand. This is due to either a loss of capacitance and therefore spikes in demand will generate far more heat, or the VRMs as a whole having to work harder to produce the same voltage and the same current (to fight vDroop). This affects almost all components in a PC, but specifically power supplies, motherboards, and video cards.

5.) Processor aging: a CPU or GPU can burn away the non-conductive insulation between traces over time (also due to overvolting), thus currents more easily jump to a neighboring trace. However, if you're at this stage, you'd notice your system slowing down because error-correction is kicking in, notice corrupted data, or simply have a system experiencing lots of kernel panics.

To be honest I haven't checked the CPU temps while the game is running for a while, as last time I was having temperature issues it was my older graphics card having issues, causing the comp to lock up, upgrading the graphics card solved the issue for a good while, and now it seems to be back in a different way.

I am currently stuck at work but will check all the above, temps and make sure the fans are clean (as a rule I do clean those regular though), also I have had the same motherboard/CPU and power supply for a while now so as you have said cipher it could well be they are getting to the stage of needing replacement, although reading your suggestions I don't use Vsync as it seems to cause slight stuttering when I do (using lockstep), so thats worth a try too.

Hopefully lowering settings a little will help as this did before replacing my graphics card, and that will at least enable me to play while I get the time / funds to upgrade the older stuff.

Thanks for all the help and suggestions guys, I shall monitor temps and try the settings adjustments the rest of this week then post back here when I have more info, and what (hopefully) helps.