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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."
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?
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.
A link? Shit I own one. Dell XPS m1330; I've had the motherboard replaced twice already for video failure, and I got the thing in September of 07. Yes, that's right, replaced twice in less than a year.
The flaw is every bit as bad as everyone makes it out to be.
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.
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..
Are any desktop chips affected, or only laptop chips?
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.
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..
My DELL XPS M1710 has a 7950GTX and never had any issues. The DELL BIOS does have some issues with heat management so I run l8kfan to keep heat at acceptable levels.
On top of that, did you know most new DELL laptops (confirmed on XPS and VOSTRO) wont read S.M.A.R.T? I think heat killed my original hard drive but the BIOS wouldn't report the drive was going bad. They should fire whoever made the decision that removing this feature was an improvement.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
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 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?
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.
Note that they conveniently prevent you from downloading the old BIOS to revert the upgrade, by removing old version from their web site, if the increased fan noise is a problem for you. Under the pretense of "avoiding confusion", they will not allow you to get the original version:
I do not see the previous BIOS version on the HP Support Web? What happened to the previous versions of the BIOS? In order to eliminate any confusion on which BIOS version is the latest, only the latest version is available on the Web.
Ford tried to do this to me with my car. It would make a shuddering noise somewhere in the front end at low speed (eg parking lots). I mentioned it to them each service and they said they'd look at it, and when I got it back after the service they said they'd flushed the power steering system and upgraded the car computer firmware.
The first service after the warranty expired I took it in and they said that there was a faulty hose causing the problem and it would take $$$ to fix. I got them to fix it under warranty eventually but I wonder how many other people they screwed over...
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad
Does this affect the new 9xxx chips as well? Here is a table (translation) listing which mobile 9x chips are equivalent to which 8x chips. Are they really identical except for the name, or has the thermal problem been fixed?
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).
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - George Bernard Shaw
The question you raise I'll restate as: Is what Charlie saying wrong? I prefer Nvidia to ATI because of their Linux drivers. But drivers alone a complete system does not make. Real is real and the truth is truth.
-[d]-
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad
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.
This isn't true. I actually know that NVidia are not granting interviews to Charlie because they think he hates them. So they didn't say this, not even unofficially. Actually, I can sort of see their point - pretty much everything he writes about them is incredibly hostile and given that they won't speak to him, probably completely baseless.
I'm not saying that there aren't issues, just that I'd wait until someone other than Charlie was reporting them.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
According to the authority of the Car Talk guys, once you report a problem to the dealer while under waranty, repairing it is under waranty no matter how long (or how many tries) it takes them to fix it. Sounds like you got them to admit this eventualy, but yes, car dealers are slimy. I wonder if a similar argument would apply, even though you aren't sending the laptop in for service. It's a 'known issue' of a pre-waranty-expiring condition that they are _attempting_ to service with the patch. If it fails later in life, can you claim that it was an unsuccessful attempt to fix a previous, covered problem and should still be covered?
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Hey, I benefited from almost the exact same problem. I was test driving a program car, and it drove like a dream - except when I turned the steering wheel all the way to the side. Then it sounded like someone had a low-speed metal grinder under the hood. I told the salesman, and he pulled the car's record to look into it. As it turns out, the previous owner had tried to get that noise fixed maybe 5 times, but their dealer couldn't permanently repair it, so the owner returned it under their state's lemon law. My local dealer asked if I'd be interested in the car if they could fix it, so I went home to let them dig around inside.
As it turns out, there's a corrugated metal hose near the steering mechanism. When you turned the wheel all the way, it pushed a motor against that hose and caused the noise. The permanent fix? A plastic wire tie to pull the hose half an inch to the side. I got the car in mint condition for half price eight years ago, and I'm still driving it today.
Ummm, this is an obligatory car analogy to the laptops, so don't mod me off-topic.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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."