Heavy static on new laptop (not just background noise)?

I've been using a new laptop (Asus A53SV-NH51, which has i5 2.40 GHz and GT540M, 6GB memory), and most stuff seems fine. Minimal issues with TF2 and L4D running at native resolution. I tried a more demanding game (Red Factiong Guerilla), and it's rather troublesome. Even when my desktop had an 8800 GT (the recommended) it didn't take very well to certain explosions, but this computer is freaking out. Normal framerate driving or just shooting, I even tried a mech for a while and blew up quite a few cars rather dramatically with smoke coming out of the back of the mech the whole time, no problem. When the physics of buildings get involved, it gets ugly. The framerate not only disappears, but there is incredibly nasty static, practically to the point of white noise. It's not in the background, it overrides the rest of the sound. I know the game can get pretty nuts, but that sound doesn't seem healthy. I've tried setting preferred device to the Nvidia hardware, but that's actually when the static was at its worst after I tried that.

It's not the normal background static you can hear in certain laptops when headphones are plugged in. It was, as I said, high frequency, white noise-esque unhealthy static.