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 :)
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.
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.
Here are the Dell models which have BIOS updates, from TFA:
Inspiron 1420
Latitude D630
Latitude D630c
Dell Precision M2300
Vostro Notebook 1310
Vostro Notebook 1400
Vostro Notebook 1510
Vostro Notebook 1710
XPS M1330
XPS M1530
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.
Sadly, it's not the laptops that are the problem. The problem apparently exists in all G84 and G86 chips, including those on desktop models.
This was reported by the inquirer (and here, i think) a few weeks ago, but apparently the news hasn't been getting around..
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
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..
Are any desktop chips affected, or only laptop chips?
On Inspiron 1420s the Nvidia is an option - and was back in early 2007 when I got mine. Unless you specifically paid for the 'better' chip, you got an Intel® GM965 Express chipset, with Graphics Media Accelerator X3100.
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
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
Sorry, I was distracted by the picture of the BREASTS on TFA page
No sig for you!!
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."
... 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.
More like $50 million for trial lawyer fees and a $5 coupon for each consumer to use towards any new G84/86 equipped laptop.
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.
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.
The problems come down to the use of Child labour particularly in places such as South-east Asia being used to recover components but mostly metals from circuit boards. A lot of lead was being leached in the process directly into the water supply. A lead-acid battery returned to the right place results in very little lost material.
See my journal, I write things there
Not all the Dell XPS M1330 mount an NVidia chip. ;)
I own one and mine has an Intel GM965/GL960.
You had to pay 100$ more for the pleasure of having a burning NVidia chip
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.
"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'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?"
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."