A couple weeks after Phase 3 started I noticed that my video card was making an odd whirring sound so I assumed it was one of my case fans. I fiddled around with my fan speed control and it seemed to effect the rate of the whirring. However It started getting so bad that i decided to open up my case and figure out what the cause was and realized that it was my GPU. Neither of the fans seem to be going out or anything and when I lightly press the corner of the card together with my fingers the noise stops.
I've never had this noise issue before playing FFXIV and It hasn't happened since the end of P3. However when I started messing around with the character creator on the benchmark the noise started up almost immediately.
I've played several other games since then and haven't heard the noise at all (Borderlands 2, L4D2, LoL, Farcry 3, Skyrim, etc). All of them are most likely on par with FFXIV in terms of GPU usage and temperature and they still don't produce the noise. I've even tried manually turning up my GPU fan speeds to see if I could cause the noise but nothing happens. This is truely only an issue with FFXIV and it is quite unbearable considering my tower is about two feet from my head when I play.