Slashdot Mirror
Laptops With Certain NVidia Chips Failing
Eukariote writes "An estimated 18 million laptops with NVidia G84 and G86 graphics chips sold in the past one and a half years are experiencing high failure rates. Various laptop models from multiple manufacturers (Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others) are affected. NVidia blames it on bad chip packaging causing thermal failure. BIOS updates that turn the laptop fan on more frequently or permanently have been released by Dell and HP. The cynical interpretation is that this is likely to only delay the problem until the warranty has expired."
Having to have my laptop fan all of the time to account for a bad chip is an unacceptable fix. It's loud, it takes more electricity to run, and it shortens the life of the fan, and possibly the whole computer as a result.
I don't respond to AC's.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - George Bernard Shaw
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad
The short story is that all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. No exceptions. All of them, mobile and desktop, use the exact same ASIC, so expect them to go south in inordinate numbers as well. There are caveats however, and we will detail those in a bit.
Both of these ASICs have a rather terminal problem with unnamed substrate or bumping material, and it is heat related. If you ask Nvidia officially, you will get no reason why this happened, and no list of parts affected, we tried. Unofficially, they will blame everyone under the sun, and trash their suppliers in very colourful language.
When the process engineers pinged by the INQ picked themselves off the floor from laughing, they politely said that there is about zero chance that NV would change the assembly process or material set for a batch, much less an EOL part.
For dessert, there's this article to finish :)
Unc Mongoni!
My MacBookPro turned on one morning, and everything worked but the display. I managed to log in, launch iTunes and play some music, but no graphics output. A trip to the Apple store later and I'm out a machine for a week. Never had an explanation, but now I am curious if i should send it back and ask for a new logic board with a graphics chip that isn't going to fail again prematurely due to faulty design.
What should/can I do?
i think that the better quality control of apple makes my computer immune to the problem, the genius bar can surely fix this problem and replace the computer for a new one, try this with dell.
This way, please.
Does anyone have a link to a list of laptop models that use these chips?
to say that possibly the manufacturer packaged and shipped these chips with inadequate cooling ? The best chip of any manufacturer is susceptible to heat failure. Why is it all Nvidia's fault, seems to me it should be a shared responsibilty. They need to come up with a viable solution and compensate the people who may be affected.
As detailed in this thread, the GF8400 has serious performance problems under Vista Aero when running recent driver versions. I wonder if this is related? - i.e. Recent driver updates have down-clocked the GPU leading to bad performance. Dell have however recently acknowledge the problem and is working on a fix.
waiting to form.
Charlie gets it right. Let's see, 18 million notebook machines. Freight each way, plus cost of labor to fix them and the materials needed. Less than $10 a machine! Great, that math stuff. Yup, a $150-200 million charge oughta do it at around $10 a machine!
Hello? This is the SEC? Hey, I have a question about an 8K I saw for NVidia. It goes like this.....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The article about trolling is the next one down. Easy mistake to make.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Does this have anything to do with the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death? And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
Nvidia has been said to have had a hand in the design of some parts of the 360, and the problem sounds like it is identical.
That said, on my own laptop (a Dell Inspiron 6000i) sees at least 8 hours a day of actual use, and is generally powered on at least 20 hours per day. The default fan control keeps the fan spinning all the time at smoothly varied speeds, with a heavy tendency to keep it spinning at high speed for long periods of time following heavy loads. This is very annoying to me.
Instead, I run i8kfangui, which lets me control (based on the temperature of the CPU, GPU, RAM, or hard drive) the fan's speed. It keeps dust accumulation and noise down, and works pretty well. The tradeoff is that it (by my choice) keeps the CPU in a constant and dramatic swing between 52 and 43 degrees Celcius:
The fan is simply off below 43C, then turns at low speed once the CPU reaches 52C. If it gets to 68C (which almost never happens, and is quite hot for a CPU) it spins at high speed. I find this behavior to be very preferable.
But the point is that it is generally a slow climb to 52C, and a fast fall to 43C, over and over in an abusive thermal-stress scenario. This cycle repeats a dozen or so times per hour, 8-20 hours per day, and has done so for three years. It works fine,
The motherboard is not RoHS compliant, and so presumably was built with lead-based solder. However it seems that most new machines are built with lead-free solders, all of which seem to have various problems.
Are there any metallurgists in the house who might care to speculate on the relationship between lead-free solders and systemic failure of laptops due to heat cycling?
Kid-proof tablet..
I have an Inspiron 9400 originally with a Geforce Go 7900GS which is NOT part of this issue. It still failed. Two months after the warranty expired.
The problem was overheating, but not because of Nvidia, because Dell was too lazy to design laptops with proper cooling. After replacement, I modded my case a little to add a two heatpipe card, and now run another program which keeps all fans on full 24/7. The difference in temperature is about 15 degrees C IDLING. Under load it is more like 20 degrees C. Dell could have done this in the factory with minimal effort, they just know that they wont fail for at least a year, which is the standard warranty length.
Are any desktop chips affected, or only laptop chips?
I just got off the phone with HP customer care. No tricks, no run alongs, just some info and a shipping box on its way.
I used to use this laptop as a space heater on cold winter nights. Many memories sitting around it, roasting marshmallows and sipping cider...
Well, this is interesting timing.
A month ago my MacBook Pro (17", GeForce 8600) died horribly while I was playing World of Warcraft. It threw a kernel panic every time I started it up, and while the screen worked, it was a mass of vertical lines.
It looked exactly like the fourth picture in this gallery:
http://gallery.mac.com/justinhart#100193
Apple replaced the motherboard, and I'm fine again, but I never did find out the root cause.
Hmm...
Nah, those chips just failed their saving throw vs. death.
Interesting, that I just returned my Lenovo laptop with a NVidia processor just 3 weeks ago since it crapped out.
OK, the Inquirer's left menu's Review section [pic] is getting way out of hand.
I had the exact same experience in June, and I've seen plenty of other people in forums have it, too. There's some debate though whether this is the problem, or whether there's some sort of firmware glitch, as the machines show a different video card if you VNC into them and look at the system information.
Sounds like you're drawing a long bow to me.
The problem here sounds like it's inside the chips themselves.
I'm no metallurgist or hardware expert but I'd have thought solder is used when mounting the chips to the board, not inside the board itself.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
To date, abnormal failure rates with systems other than certain notebook systems have not been seen.
Another educated estimate says about half the parts are potentially affected
So is it certain notebooks or half of all GPUs Nvidia shipped during a 16 month period? And where did the Enquirer get their "educated estimate?" They then use this "estimate" to assume a failure rate that goes in the divisor part of a rather nasty equation to come up with an outrageous recall estimate, even though there is no recall. Conclusion: Nvidia is going bankrupt. This is journalism?
I just had my motherboard changed out in my Dell Precision M65 - NVidia Quadro FX 350M chip. Seems the chip is glued, yes, no solder, to the motherboard and the heat generated from the clogged fan assembly inadequatly cooling the copper heat sink, caused the chip to lift off. Two things - keep your heat sink on the fan clear of fuzzies and if the fan is on all the time or very soon after boot-up, vacuum out the junk from the bottom of the laptop, not the back. Excesive fan use is a bad sign. Mark
The HP DV2000 DV6000 and DV9000 series laptops are all affected. The BIOS updates just make the fan spin more often, thats it. HP has extended the MFG warranties to 2 years from the date of purchase. At GeekSquad/Best Buy HP has been offering a LOT of replacements for these laptops authorized through HP, but the laptops have to be DOA and sent to service which takes about a week to two weeks. I've sent off atleast 15 HP laptops in the past 6 months for replacement/repair. I give HP some credit for atleast trying to fix the problem and/or replace the whole laptops themselves. I don't know what other MFG's are doing..
Has anyone found that the HP driver update page for their laptop does not have the updated bios flash utility? I have a dv6302tx which has a Geforce Go 7400 however the latest bios flash download is F.29 from 2007 and not F.3D.
I have an 8400M in my Dell 1420 laptop. It's idling around 54C right now. It gets pretty warm when playing HL2, so I bought a cooling base which seems to help a lot.
From the sound of it, the BIOS update isn't going to do much, if anything. What to do, what to do? Just continue use and hope it's under warranty if and when it fails?
Sorry, I was distracted by the picture of the BREASTS on TFA page
No sig for you!!
I have one of these chips in my laptop, and I would rather like it to fail now when the laptop is under warranty rather than later.
Can anyone come with a good solution?
I would like it not to be obvious abuse.
Exactly what kind of activity exercises/heats this chip a lot?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
My old Dell Inspiron 9300 died on me a few months ago. It had a 6800 mobile with 256 mb of vram. It was very peculiar -- I was copying some files from my desktop on the network and it suddenly shut off.
After booting up I found that XP could display 640x480@4 and Ubuntu managed 800x600@16. It turns out that the video ram is completely corrupt -- neither OS can recognize the card anymore.
On another note, I'm pretty unhappy with how Dell handles replacements for these cards: another 6800 would cost me over $400. I won't be getting it fixed anytime soon, which is really a shame (it has a 1920x1200 display).
Right after I buy a Lenovo IdeaPad where one of the "selling points" was it's nVidia discrete graphics.
No sig for you!!
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/31/figuring-out-which-nvidia-gpus-are-defective-its-a-lot/
GeForce Go 7000
6000 lines
Quadro NVS 135M
Quadro FX 360M
Something has gone terribly wrong, or right.
ATI must LOVE this. It is definitely helping
ATI's image.
A lot of nvidia chips are messed up.
It almost makes me want to go to ATI.
Almost.
But nvidia is admitting their mistake.
Probably because they can't lie about it, and
they don't want a mega lawsuit on their ass.
These laptops were made by chinks, right?
You moron, the problem is all about the chips, not laptops, no matter where were they made.
I have an HP dv9571eo with an nVidia geforce 8400 in it, but the list I've seen with affected HP laptops (can't find the link now) doesn't include the dv9500 series.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Just when I bough an HP Pavilion dv6000 series laptop with a GeForce 8400M GS (G86), it does run hot very fast, damn it, and they didn't have a comparable laptop with a comparable ATI card (BestBuy).
I called HP and, after convincing the tech support guy that removing Vista and installing XP on the laptop did NOT cause the problem, sent it off for repairs in the middle of June. I was given a 2 week time period for it to be finished.
After a week and a half they sent me an e-mail saying that parts were on order and it might be another week. So July 8th was the new date.
After the 9th I called HP again and again was told parts were still on order. I was given a new date of July 22nd! I e-mailed HP's CEO and was contacted a few days later. HP said that they had been authorized to replace this series of laptop and asked me to fax in the specs from the broken one, which I did. About 2 weeks later a laptop was shipped to my old address (after having given HP the new one on 3 occasions: when I first called tech support, when I e-mailed the CEO, and when the case manager contacted me).
The laptop arrived and so far the only thing that doesn't work is DVD burning. Sure, it gets about 92% done, then dies. I've given up though and decided to just not buy HP products anymore.
To those who are having the problems mentioned for HP I strongly suggest sending an e-mail to Mark Hurd, the CEO. He doesn't write back personally obviously but someone contacted me just a day or two later.
It's just too bad HP has come to this (whether it's nVidia's fault or not is open to debate) but after an issue arises it is up to the manufacturer to take responsibility for their products. Man, I remember the days of HP meaning quality, the 2, 3, 4, and 5 series of laser printers were slow, sure, but they were steel and lasted forever. Now they sell these plastic pieces of crap that die after a year and, when contacted, all HP will do is give you $50 off of a new one. Wow, did Carly destroy HP or what?
"This food is problematic."
wow. my dell latitude d630 w/ nvidia quadro NVS 135 M just failed yesterday. the internal graphics are now dead and the external vga is garbled.
or a new laptop to exchange for the one I have with the bad NVida chip in it?
Over night it reports a critical error and shuts down. I have things scheduled to go on at night while I sleep so I can use my laptop by day. I think the chip overheats due to this defect.
If not, is there a class action lawsuit I can join?
... I would "stress test" the hell out of it more so if the manufacturer will be replacing it with an Intel or ATI GPU...
Sure this might be borderline immoral but aren't the laptop manufacturers in conjunction with nVidia acting in bad faith by not replacing the defective laptops with non defective ones? BIOS updates to run the fans all the time is not the real solution.
Its price is the lowest since 1990 ($4.2 today); Just fired its CEO; Very favorable reviews for upcoming ATI4xxx GPU; Troubles for NV; What do ya thinking?
Your comment assumes that higher technology is always better.
Sometimes what you need is a hammer, not a jackhammer. I'm not convinced the massive failures all over the place that result from using lead-free solder are worth the incremental environmental benefit.
I've been having quite a few issues:
http://weblog.oriontransfer.org/2008/07/23/nvidia-and-macbook-pro-issues
I've put some links to the kinds of problems people are having with the MBP.
If you're worried about a specific machine (windows), rightclick your desktop, go to Properties, Settings and see what adapters are listed
More like $50 million for trial lawyer fees and a $5 coupon for each consumer to use towards any new G84/86 equipped laptop.
I just recently (within the last two weeks) bought a Macbook Pro. I noticed that the damn thing is running so hot that I can't touch it after a little while. I bought one of those silly Targus USB cooling platforms to rest it on and that thing doesn't make much difference. The laptop is nice. The OS is stable. It runs WoW at 150+fps. Having read this article I'm thinking about taking it back and waiting another six months for them to build a unit that doesn't have such insane heat problems. Seriously, for two grand I'm not excited about the prospect of the thing melting down.
The USAF had a reliability program that ran from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s which did quite a bit to make electronics more reliable in the field. About 1% of the USAF's "black boxes" were marked with stickers that said something like "USAF Reliability Program Unit - If unit breaks, replace entire unit and send broken unit to ... for analysis".
When broken units came into the analysis shop, a considerable effort was made to find out exactly which component had failed and how it had failed. This went way beyond normal repair. When a bad part was located, the part was opened up and examined with an electron microscope or X-rayed, as appropriate, to see exactly what had gone wrong.
The USAF would frequently publish pictures from this program in Aviation Week. You'd see pictures of bad lead joints inside an IC package, too-long internal leads that had failed under high G loads, and bad on-chip etching. Manufacturers of bad parts were named. Inspectors were sent to plants to figure out what had gone wrong with the manufacturing process. The problem got fixed or the supplier stopped getting military contracts.
This worked well when the military bought most electronic components. By the 1980s, consumer electronics were using electronics at least as sophisticated as the military, and the military had to start using "commercial, off the shelf" components. Today, the USAF has trouble getting any special attention from parts suppliers.
Auto manufacturers still do things like this. Because they have to pay for recalls, they need to find out why things break and fix the production process, even if it's at a supplier.
I still have half a year of warranty on my Vostro 1400, but it's time to extend it to a three or five year plan. They can fix it as many times as it breaks until the thing is so old it outgrows its usefulness.
I really did get the hottest new laptop!
Cool!
(or, not...)
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
Almost all lead use is for lead-acid batteries. I'm talking 99% or more. Lead in solder is one a fraction of the remaining fraction of a percent. So it seems that it is kind of stupid to start worrying about lead in solder, when it is such a small use. This goes double given that it causes a higher failure rate.
When looking at an environmental policy (or any policy for that matter), the question always has to be benefit vs cost. Just looking at the benefits is not a good way of doing things. Yes, eliminating lead in solder may have a minor (extremely minor) environmental benefit. However what are the costs? I mean cost both in the sense of the economic cost, but also in terms of the environmental costs. Does the higher failure rate offset and even eliminate the benefit of no lead?
I bought an Inspiron 1530 in July of 07. Within 6 months it had suffered a lot of 'terminal' overheating (system lockups, crashes, shutdowns).
I went through the laughably bad Dell support to replace parts one at a time; starting with the keyboard because the system got so hot the keyboard warped itself out of the tray.
When the new keyboard came in I did a full teardown and rebuild, replacing the fans with brand new items, putting thermal paste on the processors, cleaning everything for dust buildup. I put it back together and that night the laptop got so hot I could boil water on the touch-pad (i8Kfangui showing temps in the 110c range).
I sent Dell some pictures of the temp probes (screenshots and photographs) and they adamantly denied that the laptop was at fault; one of their service reps even accused me of "over-using" the equipment (whatever that means). I finally got them to send me a replacement video card, and that solved the problem for about 3 weeks, but then the heat issue came back.
Dell refused to service the laptop anymore, and refused to do an exchange. I eventually managed to private party exchange it for a Precision M90, and I've had no problems whatsoever with this model which has the Quadro 1500 (7900? I think) chip in it.
No real moral to the story, just lamenting. I really wanted to like that laptop, but I couldn't run the risk of it burning down my house.
$10/machine to R&R a chip on a laptop that was mailed to you for repair?! Who's offering those kinds of rates?
Or was that the point?
XPS 1330- 64gb SSD, one of those new penryn (45nm) processors, 4 gb ram, LED backlit screen... A really nice little 13.3" laptop.
:/
GPU died a few weeks ago, I've had it for maybe 5 months. I haven't called and sent it in yet, but I will.
I removed Vista and put ArchLinux on it- I really hope they don't send it back because of that
There is a problem with the chips, there is no doubt about that. However take anything Charlie says about it with a huge truckload of salt. There was a bit of bad blood between Nvidia and Charlie years ago (something like 4 or 5 now), and ever since they've refused to talk to anyone from the Inquirer and Charlie specifically.
It seems these days that all Charlie does is write long article bashing Nvidia. That is unless he's writing an article that's so over the top that his editor has to pull it (yes, believe it or not, there actually is an editor in charge of all those pieces).
Go read dell or HP forums and EE times. Read The Inq only if you want some amusement to see how amazingly slanted of a story can be produced.
You see, I know a lot of people who've bought potentially affected machines just for "videophone" use to their families
- people for whom a thousand euros is a lot of money.
(In many cases their first (ever) notebook or computer).
Even if you get a replacement, or you apply the bios fan kludge, you're *still* going to end up with a dead notebook
- it just might take a while after the warranty ends. Treat this one like the "bad caps" motherboard problem -
get your replacement and sell it really really quickly!
Does anyone know if ambient temperature plays a part in the failure? or is it temperature cycling?
Andy
I bought a Dell Latitude D630 back in early October of '07, and right around the new year the video failed completely. Fortunately, I purchased the notebook with Dell's 3yr Gold warranty and they were out the 2nd day (due to the holiday) to replace it with a refurbished board..... except that the refurbished board failed immediately. Once more the tech was out and this time I lasted until April--I was working on a job out of town when suddenly the video failed again. Fortunately for me (and thanks to the Gold support) I was up and running again the next morning.
I'm seeing a 4 month cycle here, which means I'd be due to fail again in August. I've upgraded to the new BIOS but as everyone else has noted, I'd imagine that's just a small band-aid-fix for a huge problem.
I don't know what I would have done without Dell's warranty. I had to replace another motherboard for an older Dell that was outside of warranty (unrelated problem) and it wasn't cheap. But even a great warranty can't make up for the fact that defective parts cause downtime.
I for one hope Dell/nVidia will do the right thing. This deserves a recall or a part swap of some sort at the very least. Even with a next-day-on-site warranty replacement, one day of down-time can be devastating in the middle of a large project.
Seth
probably these defective chips are made in China. look at all those toys pulled by the supplier because of lead content. they're all made in China!
laptop manufacturers and nvidia must replace this faulty chips at their expense. everyone don't update your BIOS instead blog it, voice out, and make these guys pay for this.
make them pay! make them pay!
Having a HP dv6358 that has had it's mother board replaced twice by now (and the HDD too for added bonus!) I'm dying to see where this goes. Specially, since though it seems that I have the fan update, because the fan works nonstop most of the time, my computer is still a time bomb waiting to explode. On the bad side, my warranty is up, and I'll have to fight with teeth and nails to get the company to admit that the problem lies within the computer when my mother board dies again.
What do they expect? They pay pennies to manufacture them and they get rubbish back.
Err , why don't you switch it off you idiot. That way you increase its lifetime and more importantly stop wasting so much electricity. You obviously turn it off at some point or it would be on 24 hours a day , so stop being fscking lazy and turn it off when you're done with FFS.
I've got a XPS M1530; runs games for days no problems.
Maybe I'm lucky?
Either way, i'm not gonna install an update that'll make the machine think it's a helicopter just yet.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I had these symptoms on my HP DV2000H. About 3 months ago (and 1 month out of warranty) the computer started refusing to start with a blank screen and a number of bios beeps indicating a video issue. This issue only occurred sporadically at first, but now refuses to start at all. I live in Australia, and called HP Support - who refused to talk without a credit card charge as I was out of warranty - I assumed that it would be easier to just take it into a service center, so declined the "offer". Now I read this. Anyone have any suggestions of available/appropriate actions (I sent a request to through the general support page on the HP Australia support requesting my questions be sent to the appropriate person - so they have a chance to address the issue first).
Let's say Dell, Sony or HP accept the failure, make a recall and fix your laptop for free. That won't help at all to people who bought a computer in USA a few months ago and now are overseas in an isolated area either studying, working or hell, even in Irak.
That was the whole point of getting a notebook for me, using it in the field. And we expect it to work for more that a fucking year.
I know there are professional gear like those Panasonic ones that can even stand EMP but all I wanted was something that, under normal use, didn't burn and explode.
I guess I will have to accept just a firmware update or underclocking...
Since when do we put any stock in The Inquirer stories? As I recall, pretty much 99% of them in the past decade have turned out to be total bullshit.
I am still using a legacy 2ghz P4 laptop that has an ATI display in it. My economic status doesn't warrant going out and dropping a couple thousand on a new laptop at the drop of a hat like many of my 'youthful' counterparts who have no responsibilities other than an unusually high car payment for something they drive to impress the girls!
When I ultimately do go looking, I think it's high time now that maybe we all focus on computers with "proven" hardware which may not be state of the art for you to play the latest game on it, but at least you know you'll have a device that will be around for a while. Some of us, don't need to have the latest greatest device every six months!
I'm very disappointed in some of these manufacturers as when they design this stuff, they are doing testing to see how things are stressed especially with laptop designs. HP has always made stable hardware if not the most state of the art. Dell has been up there too except for the Inspiron line. My Latitude I used to have was handed down to my daughter and she used it up to last year when she got herself a new dual core Toshiba. Damned ATI chips just seem to keep working albeit not the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Time to ask; do I really need all that hardware acceleration on the graphics chip with that laptop? Some is good, but if the hardware can't be properly supported or cooled in a laptop design, it shouldn't be there in the first place. Having a manufacturer come up with a band-aide solution for some of these problems until the warranty expires isn't new either. I used to see that in consumer electronics back in the 80's.
Some of these video card designs in laptops are there expressly for hardware acceleration that is mostly requested or generated by game companies more than anything else. Business use doesn't normally need or require this much less Internet surfing. Tell me that when you go buy a laptop, you aren't also thinking of how good that new game you want is going to run on it too??!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Exactly my point.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Has anyone here had an experience with the failure of one of these nVidia chips?
www.purevolume.com/martyd
I had a dv2210us and it had this problem. It was under warranty and I sent it in and they kept pushing back the return date by 15days each time I called. I hassled their case manager line and after a lot of meandering they did give me a new laptop. Its a dv2700. After reading this article I guess I've been snookered, since this should ALSO have the defective GPU. I guess I need to call HP again! I wish these guys would play straight.
Summary:
"An estimated 18 million laptops with NVidia G84 and G86 graphics chips sold in the past one and a half years are experiencing high failure rates."
No, this is untrue. 18 million laptops are NOT experiencing this.
From TFA: ... "Another educated estimate says about half the parts are potentially affected, lets call it 18 million bad parts."
"for this estimate, we will be using very rough and round number(s)"
This is a guess at the number of parts in the field, not the number that have failed.
I just had a new nvida 7025 in a biostar motherboard get toasted after one day of use on a new desktop. If you put a piece of hardware together for the general public, it should withstand certain normal uses including playing the most basic openGL games if that is what it is designed and advertised to do. It was obvious that the heat sink was insufficient to fully protect the motherboard, and the software also did not kick in to do anything like turn it off when it overheated. It is like a car being sold without a radiator or a temperature gauge. Yes, I know there is software to see it, but what about even automatic protection? That a processor of any sort is allowed, without manual intervention, to burn itself up in a stock configuration is the fault of Nvidia 100%. That is a design flaw from both nvidia and the motherboard makers. The sad thing is that was the first Nvidia anything I had ever bought, after all my years in computing. It will be the last. I hope this slashdot thread has the powers that be at Nvidia squirming. You are in danger of loosing your biggest market, GEEKS, Gamers, IT people who make decisions about what to buy for entire office buildings.
Living in Chile
Don't see anything about AMD/ATI products having widespread fatal flaws. I mean, the one they had recently wasn't fatal and they fixed it anyway...
Just Sayin'...
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
This might apply to more than just cars. I had an issue with my old HP ZD7000 laptop while under warranty. When I contacted HP about it, they said they were working on a fix and to check back with them in about four months. As the laptop was still fairly usable, I waited.
After four months I called back and got the "oh yeah, there's a fix for that now, but sorry you're out of warranty." I had to get on their case about it, but once they tracked my old ticket # to the same issue the accepted the laptop for warranty service.
I'd suggest that if you have a problem that doesn't get fixed ASAP, write down the ticket # and details of the problem. Hell, even if it's "fixed" then it's a good idea to do so, that way you have evidence that the problem existed and was reported before the end of the warranty period.
If it gets to 68C (which almost never happens, and is quite hot for a CPU)
Depends a lot on the CPU, I've seen CPU's that were rated safe up to temperatures almost high enough to boil water. Some have better heat tolerances/dissipation than others. I don't know about others, but AMD chips usually have a code you can look up to see the nominal heat-range no the CPU (old Athlons often ran hot as hell, 60-65c was pretty common).
And do these problems, in turn, have something to do with RoHS [wikipedia.org] certification, due to lead-free solders being less durable?
Does anyone else smell irony?
Lead-free solder=environmentally friendly=
faster breaking electronics=more electronic waste=
less environmentally friendly...
Competing companies can in some instances band together for common good. If Nvidia/ATI/Intel/VIA/etc all use fairly common suppliers, and those suppliers are giving out crap parts, then it's in the interest of graphics manufacturers in general to trace the problem down.
I've seen a few different cases where companies that compete against each other on-the-shelf contribute to standards-bodies or QA groups that benefit them all.
With many tax-free shopping holidays and the back to school season upon us, it would be interesting to see if there is a spike in the number of GPU failures later this year.
I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1420 with a 8400M GS in July 2007. The laptop gets crazy HOT. I am sure it would burn my skin if I had it on my lap. Not sure if it is the graphics card, poor air flow, whatever.
On June 28, 2008, it died. They came to the house several times and eventually replaced both the motherboard and processor with brand new parts (since the refurbished ones did not work). On July 19, it died again. They came to the house to replace the motherboard. The technician said it was most likely the graphics card. He said a lot of them go bad. My warranty was to expire on July 30 so I extended it for another three years ($317.23 but $75 came back in Dell dollars). On July 28, the LCD died. Yup, they came out and replaced it. I hate my laptop but I take comfort in knowing Dell is bleeding from all the servicing calls.
"I'm sitting on a house" usually means that the speaker is literally on the roof of a house, ..."
Tex Avery had a nice interpretation regarding the terms "house", "on" and "roof", incorporating "drinks" as well (@3:30+).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I have been aware of this problem since early January when a friend's dv6000 series died and I managed to find this article. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&lang=en&docname=c01087277&product=1842155&dlc=en HP has extended their coverage for these laptops to two years and replace and/or fix them for free under warranty. Although the affected models, dv2000, dv6000, and dv9000's to have a wide range of chipsets, the majority of the dv6000's are nVidia chipset based, and at the workbench I work at all 3 cases I have seen and printed that Extended Warranty sheet for have been dv6000 series with nVidia chipsets and all had replacement motherboards put in from HP for free.
Well, if the chips were fabbed in Red China, they probably used lead instead of silicon.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
"I'm sitting on (a subject you wouldn't normally sit on and which might be valuable or desirable)"
Usually refers to having something but NOT using it. Inferred is usually that you would like to do something with the subject, like sell it or invest with it.
"Do you know where I can get a laptop?"
"I'm sitting on a laptop."
"I want to gather some VC to start up a buisness."
"Well I'm sitting on a bunch of matured CDs"
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I bought my Dell (Inspiron 6400 with an ATI GPU) about a year and a half ago, and it has consistently had problems with over heating. The first time, 6 months after I bought it, the problem had degraded to the point where the laptop would crash ever half hour if not more often from heat lockup. Dell serviced it and it was working fine... until 6 months later when it started getting the occasional heat lockup again, and the laptop had just fallen out of warranty. Now I am at the point where if I turn on Kwin desktop effects, or play a game, or sometimes just playing a video, the laptop will quickly overheat and lockup. No warranty for me now! I have been greatly displeased with this laptop since the first month in.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. - Krishnamurti
My Macbook Pro has horrible thermal problems, and I'm using a third party program to take over my fan control to keep it cool... and mine's got an ATI GPU.
Okay, time to download GPU-Z and look for what? How are the bad chips specifically identified by a user whose computer manufacturer is still stonewalling? Do it say Nvidia G84 or G86, or just LOOK OUT?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"That's quite a theory, except that the solder has nothing at all to do with a graphics chip overheating."
Bullshit! Poor solder jobs tend to generate excess heat (trapped air inside the solder joint, too much solder leading to difficulties venting heat, etc.) and also tend to cause failures as well. And on such a small level as soldering die to package, there's plenty of room for a fuckup caused purely by a shit solder job.
BTW - RoHS compliant solder SUCKS. It is brittle, and nowhere near as malleable as lead solder.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Note that Apple's MacBooks, MacBook Pros and desktops are all experiencing a high rate of kernel exceptions that cause the machine to halt. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1065674&tstart=0 Apple denies that a problem exists. If you have problems post to the Apple forum. For the search engines here's what the kernel exception looks like. 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout! 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 0000000c 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00200000 00008297 0000047c 00000000 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00000486 00001310 00000000 00000003 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00000000 00000000 00000002 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 0000000c 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00200000 00008297 0000047c 00000000 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00000486 00001310 00000000 00000003 7/31/08 3:01:50 PM kernel 00000000 00000000 00000002 7/31/08 3:02:02 PM kernel NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout! 7/31/08 3:02:09 PM kernel NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error 7/31/08 3:02:09 PM kernel 0000000c 7/31/08 3:02:09 PM kernel 00200000 00008297 0000047c 00000000 7/31/08 3:02:09 PM kernel 00000486 00001b0c 1000f010 00000003 7/31/08 3:02:09 PM kernel 00000000 00000000 00000011 7/31/08 3:03:00 PM com.apple.launchctl.System[2] fsck_hfs: Volume is journaled. No checking performed.
That HP was about 6 months out of warranty and I wasn't even going to consider paying for a replacement motherboard. Now that HP has generously extended the warranty on it, maybe I'll have them repair it - then sell it or give it away.
In the 18 months since it was new I've replaced the keyboard, a hard drive, the battery and two optical drives. That's five hardware failures in 18 months; make that six now that the motherboard is dead. How can they keep turning out cheap crap like this and stay in business?
Better yet, I'd like to see them explain how they knew about this problem before they sold me that machine? They sold hundreds of thousands of affected HP laptops knowing full well that the video chip had a process problem that caused it to fail prematurely. They could have repaired or scrapped these machines before selling them - they KNEW they were defective.
And now they want to "fix" the problem with a BIOS patch that runs the fan at high speed continuously? That is not a fix for the problem - all it does is delay the ultimate failure.
So the new HP works like this: Did we have a bunch of defective equipment manufactured for us? Sell it anyway! When people start having problems, pretend it doesn't exist and deny, deny, deny. Pressure from the public over the problem? Do the cheapest thing possible to make them go away.
I know I've learned my lesson: no more HP products!
This is a very widespread problem, I work for a major retailer in a tech repair department and we are getting piles of laptops with busted nforce chipsets. Anything reliant on nvidia technology seems to be randomly dying prematurely, such as the wifi, video, or other chipset reliant features.
The 790i boards are getting pulled as well. You can read about it here. I tried submitting it,but as with everything I've submitted it will rot in pending for 1-5 days until KDawson or one of the old guys submit the exact same story word for word then it will be rejected. So when I find something interesting I will simply submit it in a post and let the mods decide if it is worth reading. Thank you and have a nice day.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
My friend and I both got the Inspiron 1420n (ubuntu linux version) and have not had any problems. i don't notice any excessive heat either the way other people have mentioned. i'm hoping the problems are do to Vista taxing the system and its poor resource management, i use my computer a lot and it a year old. but i would like to know, have any 1420n people had a problem yet?
I just had to reinstall a Windows box the other day. It had an NForce chipset motherboard. I installed the NVidia IDE drivers and all hell broke lose. Windows would freeze up within two minutes of booting. A Google search showed numerous people with problems.
NVidia drivers are crap. Bastards need to get out of the chipset business and stick to graphics - where their drivers are also frequently crap.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
HP has extended the warranty on certain affected laptops to 24 months. Mine had this problem and I had the motherboard replaced this March, 3 months after my warranty would have expired.
Here is the info:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01087277&lc=en&cc=us