Nvidia 55nm Parts Are Bad Too

JagsLive sends in a story (in somewhat inflammatory prose) from The Inquirer, which links to many others; they have been following developments in the alleged NVidia quality "fiasco" for some time. "Hot on the heels of its denials that anything is wrong with the G92 and G94s comes another PCN [Product Change Notification] that shows the G92s and G92b are being changed for no reason. Yup, the problems that are plaguing G84 and G86 are the same that affect seemingly all 65nm and now 55nm NVidia parts ... It is hard to overstate how bad this is. Basically every 65nm and 55nm NVidia part appears to be defective ... We are hearing of early failure rates in the teens percent for 8800GTs and far higher for 9600GTs ... To make matters worse, NVidia has a mound of unsold defective parts that they are going to bleed out into the channel along side of the (hopefully) fixed parts. As a buyer, you have no way of knowing which one you are getting ... Until NVidia comes fully clean on this fiasco, lists all the defective parts, and orders boxes clearly marked, you can't say anything other than just avoid them. Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen."

Comments

Actually, not that big of a deal.

[bigtallmofo]

Sure, the GPU might be faulty but the rest of the components on their graphics cards (cooling fan, PCI-Express connector) are not showing any issues.

So let's not blow this out of proportion.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

WOOOOOSH!

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not the sharpest stick are you?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Broken scope]

That wasn't thunder, that was a sonic boom as the joke went right over your head.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Cheeko]

I've got this brand spanking new car if you want to buy it. I'll give you a great deal on it. The paint is brand new, custom wheels, high end brakes, a completely killer stereo system, GPS, power everything. The only problem is that there is a 15% chance the engine doesn't work.

But its just one component, so lets not blow this out of proportion, what will you give me for it?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Abreu]

Thank you for that car analogy, I understand this now.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, the GPU might be faulty but the rest of the components on their graphics cards (cooling fan, PCI-Express connector) are not showing any issues.

So let's not blow this out of proportion.

You guys all failed your sarcasm check... OP is being sarcastic.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Pedrito]

Actually, the fan on my 8500 GT which was less than year old just died. I wanted a 9800 GTX anyway, which I got, but now I'm concerned I may have wasted some $$$.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[MyLongNickName]

You have issues with sarcasm :) For example.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Bert64]

That's not really relevant now is it...
You can replace a defective CPU, ever tried removing a GPU from a videocard and replacing it?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[machine321]

I've got this brand spanking new car if you want to buy it.

Can you crush it for me?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Spy der Mann]

Note to self: don't reply hastily to slashdot posts when you didn't get enough sleep.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[darkpixel2k]

You have issues with sarcasm :) For example.

You know, they say that serial killers lack the ability to differentiate between moral and non-moral actions...this guy is sorta the same, except he can't recognize sarcasm. I suppose that makes him a serial bore.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[houstonbofh]

I've got this brand spanking new car if you want to buy it. I'll give you a great deal on it. The paint is brand new, custom wheels, high end brakes, a completely killer stereo system, GPS, power everything. The only problem is that there is a 15% chance the engine doesn't work.

But its just one component, so lets not blow this out of proportion, what will you give me for it?

It worked for Jaguar in the 70s and 80s. Other than Ford buying them, I mean.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Take the price for replacing the engine X. Well an Engine might normally die after fifteen years (aka MTBF). The depreciation cost X/15; So if this effective engine has MTBF of 5 years. Then its depreciation is X/5; At five years it will be worth nothing while a non defective engine would be worth X - X/15*3 = X*4/5. So I'll buy your car for the normal price minus X*4/5.

As this is slashdot, this is completely pulled out of my ear. Like a coin a grandpa pulls out of your ear that only seems impressive to a five year old of moderate intelligence.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[HardCase]

If only there was some kind of an award for recognizing superior achievement in revealing completely humor-impaired /.ers. And the converse for the the humor-impaired /.ers who, like a horde of nerdish lemmings, followed one another off the cliff of absurdity.

It was an OK joke, but the response? Hi-larious!

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[raynet]

The working fan blowing on your hair??

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Svartalf]

If the GPU's still working after that mishap, I'd suggest just getting a new GPU fan for it- they've got performance sinks for a bit less than buying a new card in most cases.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[michrech]

Try telling that to my MSI Wind desktop, you insensitive clod!

That's not really relevant now is it...
You can replace a defective CPU, ever tried removing a GPU from a videocard and replacing it?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[kungfugleek]

A better analogy: I've got this brand spanking new video card if you want to buy it...

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

WoooooooooooooSH!

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Bucc5062]

Thanks for dredging up the recent past. Just got over the pain in my wallet.

96' F250, Nice body, good cap, tow package and the fucking engine was shot. Caveat Emptor and in this case I failed the basic test of having my mechanic look it over before plunking money down.

btw, anyone looking for a F250 project truck? Maybe a school shop that wants to train future college grads of America.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[inotocracy]

Is your spidey sense broken?

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[LWATCDR]

You sir have without a doubt never owned an Italian or British car!
On only 15% of engine failure! That is brilliant.
To be honest the engines on both tend to be good it was the Electrics and Rust that where the real issue.
Lucas Lord of the Dark.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW. And the swoosh of the day goes to...

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Paradise Pete]

Can you crush it for me?

My understanding is that that's a mandatory service, lest he not wish to get HIS ASS SUED!!.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[jacquesm]

I own several English made cars and I can testify from personal experience that the only time when there is not oil leaking from the car is when it has run out.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[LWATCDR]

Really I thought that was limited to their motorcycles.
Hey it is a feature. It is an automated oil change.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

that's not +1 Funny, it's +1 Common Sense

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Dishevel]

He may not even pointed at all. :)

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[jacquesm]

no really, let's not blow it out of proportion, after all good money was spent to get this astroturf campaign of bad news about nvidia fanned.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Missing_dc]

I own several English made cars and I can testify from personal experience that the only time when there is not oil leaking from the car is when it has run out.

I heard that was why they never really got into making computers... They could not figure out how to make them leak oil.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You were modded funny, but the sad thing is I think you didn't get the joke and were serious. The really sad thing is the modded thought you were joking.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[zukezuke]

You're kidding, right? This is exactly like the car analogy posted below. I doubt you'd be saying this if you just found out your $2,500 laptop is unusable because of a faulty GPU.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Cheeko]

it was sarcasm with a point. I WAS trying to be funny, did get the joke, but also felt I could make a valid point with it Mr. Troll.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[brainnolo]

Indeed. On my Lancia Delta from '92 (which I only own from 3 years) the engine is still in good shape, but the car has a lot of rust and part of the electrics is broken (anti-theft, centralized locks). Not to mention how fragile the plastic parts are! I already broken the light lever, a door handle and one of those small handles inside the car for passengers to hold.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

...by my dad's lawyer, he's a BADASS SONABITCH

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Hasmanean]

600 bucks for a used engine. It's a good deal.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Well that depends, if it's Italian, then that's par for the course...

(Owner of many Italian cars, I speak from experience)

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Sockatume]

You can bet your ass Clive Sinclair tried though.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[jacquesm]

I salute you sir, for you incredible ability to perceive positive elements in your environment.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoga fire! Yoga fire!

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[NormalVisual]

Don't forget the mounting bracket and screw. As I understand, those have close to a 0% failure rate.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[NormalVisual]

It's not unusable - it'll still hold any door open just as effectively whether the GPU works or not.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[ShieldW0lf]

Nietzsche was just depressed and prone to bouts of melodrama and depression because he was born with the foresight to see my coming, but a century too early to meet me.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[arth1]

Note to self: don't reply hastily to slashdot posts when you didn't get enough sleep.

In other words, cease posting altogether?

I think I got enough sleep once, back in 2002. But I was on vacation, so I didn't post.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

no, you're just retarded. there's really no way around it. "i shouldn't post {before i have my coffee, when i'm tired} teehee" is retard speak for "yes, i'm really as stupid as i seem."

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[dwater]

>lack the ability to differentiate between moral and non-moral actions...this guy is sorta the same, except he can't recognize sarcasm.

He could be USA American. They're famous for not understanding sarcasm.[1]

...or perhaps German, but they're famous for not understanding humour in general.

[1] Once, an American couple came to work at our company and they were given the task of setting ground rules for our office. One of the things they came up with was, "No sarcasm". Their justification was that sarcasm it was personally insulting. Talk about a narrow definition. I suggested they change their 'ground rule' to "don't be personally insulting".

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[L ion-L iar]

...and I thought it was to keep the Irish from getting any chips

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.

[time2kill]

But its just one component, so lets not blow this out of proportion, what will you give me for it?

I would try not to believe everything i read, especially of what The Inquirer says about Nvidia. Nvidia has repeatedly claimed that there were just a couple of batches which faced this problem. The Inquirer has not had a good relationship with Nvidia over the fast few years since they were kept out of a couple of press conferences for not treading on confidentiality agreements. They try to blow every Nvidia issue out of proportion.

8600GT?

[Fallingcow]

At risk or not?

Also, this sounds like a class-action waiting to happen.

Re:8600GT?

[Hatta]

I've got one too and was wondering exactly the same thing. From what I can tell the 8600GT has an 80nm process size, so it should be safe. Which is good, I really like this card.

Re:8600GT?

[Bert64]

I have an 8600GT too, hopefully it's OK...

But with ATI opening up their specs and open source drivers coming along nicely, and now this issue with nvidia chips, chances are my next videocard purchase will be from ATI.

Re:8600GT?

[ickpoo]

I thought the same thing. I'll go with ATI this time, been hearing good news about their cards and their drivers.

I get a 3840HD (or something of that nature), drop it into my machine, install the drivers in the repository. Everything is great, 3d is fast, card is cool, it is working good, glxgears is 9 times faster than before. I fire up wine and attempt to run Wow (addict). Nice black screen; it worked fine with the NVidia card, just not with the ATI card. Trusty Google tells me that this is a known issue with the the ATI drivers that has been known for something like 6 months. ATI is blaming the Wine developers, the Wine developers are trying to work around the problems with ATI's drivers but are having difficulty. I fiddled with multiple different versions of the drivers and had no luck at all. So, I returned the card.

Picked up an NVidia 9600GT. Everything worked as soon as it was installed.

If NVidia fails it is going to suck for awhile. ATI's drivers are still crappy (granted NVidia's are too when using the xrender path).

Re:8600GT?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Radeon/ATI has problems too. They finally stopped replacing my 9800XT when the warranty period was up after 3 years.

Re:8600GT?

[Bert64]

Yeah, ati's proprietary drivers suck badly... They crash my macbook and i can't determine why, and they seem totally incompatible with mythtv...
On the other hand the open radeonhd drivers seem far more reliable and stable, but not as quick yet. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

Re:8600GT?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just RMA'd my 8600GT for this exact problem. After one year of use, the temps suddenly were spiking to failure levels and crashing my machine. Even tested the card on other machines.

Re:8600GT?

[Lonewolf666]

Exactly. Bought a 8600 GT a year ago, because ATI's open source initative was merely announced but nothing delivered yet, and I don't put much trust in promises.

But by now ATI looks like the better bet, as they are keeping their word. Also, the price/performance of their newer stuff seems pretty good.

Re:8600GT?

[gumbi west]

Maybe the ATI drivers crash your MacBook because it has Intel video. ;)

Re:8600GT?

[denmarkw00t]

I concur - I've been a big nVidia fan since 3dfx went under (R.I.P.). With all of this coming to light, it's either going to be a wait until nVidia cleans this up and starts doing quality assurance at a quality level or go with ATI. Open-sourcing and specs are both excellent reasons to go with a company, especially since there is at least a 15% chance that I'll be dissatisfied with my next purchase - but hey, if I have a good shopping experience, a nice drive home, a fun time installing a new card, I shouldn't get too down when it stops working, right?

Re:8600GT?

[FuturePastNow]

My understanding is that the problem is exacerbated by heat, so notebook GPUs are more likely to fail. Desktop graphics cards have better cooling. Your 8600GT may well last until you "naturally" replace it.

Re:8600GT?

[Falkentyne]

I just bought an 8600GT for my desktop rig as a temporary card for now - you know until my wife says I can spend more money.
Now whenever I play HL2 it freezes up and dies and it was working just fine the day before. Is there a program you can use to test the video card? I haven't seen anything like that mentioned yet. Are we talking complete and utter failure of the card where it doesn't output video at all or just with the 3D?

Maybe I should RTFA... haha j/k.

Re:8600GT?

[Bert64]

It's a macbook pro 17" from early last year, it most definately has an ati card, i never really liked anything with "pro" in the name tho.

Re:8600GT?

[Bert64]

My 8600GT gets rather hot actually, it seems to run fine but if i reboot the machine it won't boot up unless i let it cool off first.

Re:8600GT?

[Caboosian]

ATi isn't exactly great either. I have multiple ATi cards - an X800GTO AGP, 9800pro AGP, 9600XT AGP, and none, zero, zip, nada, work with the latest series of drivers (Catalyst 8). They all throw up blue screens when trying to run anything 3D. Why is that? Well, ATi has dropped support for AGP cards. That means you're stuck with the abysmal cat 7s if you're running AGP. To be honest, I wouldn't be very upset about this whole situation (I spent roughly 3 days pinpointing the issue) if ATi had just had the common courtesy to tell us. Instead, they opted to let all AGP users who decide to stay up to date struggle with driver problems for a while. It's such a bummer that ATi has such shitty support (consistently awful drivers, this problem, etc.), because they make some beastly cards (HD series).

Note: The AGP problem does affect all AGP cards, but hotfixes have been released for the HD series AGP cards. Ironically enough, the only cards to get hotfixes are cards that were made by third-parties.

I hope someone else enters the GPU game. I'm getting sick of being stuck between Nvidia and ATi - come back, 3dfx!

Pizza

[Sockatume]

This is the kind of story that can only end with somebody being fired for making pizza in the silicon fab oven.

Re:Pizza

[Yvan256]

Actually it was Kramer warming up his clothes in the silicon fab oven.

Re:Pizza

[Dogtanian]

I remember reading something not entirely dissimilar in Robert X Cringely's "Triumph of the Nerds". Might or might not be apocryphal; I don't have the book to hand. Apparently Intel (IIRC) were having problems. The amount of defective parts they were getting was going through the roof, and they were pulling their hair out trying to get to the root of the problem.

Finally they traced it down to the guy responsible for receiving the deliveries of the silicon wafers. Apparently he was taking out the wafers and putting them down in his desk- quite dusty and very definitely *not* up to clean room standards!- to make sure Intel was getting what they'd paid for.

Re:Pizza

[Sponge Bath]

I was told of an instance (very old) where impurities in the manufacturing environment resulted in a particular IC working.
When they overhauled the plant the impurities went away and the chip stopped working. They figured it out after a lot of expensive investigation.

I can't vouch for the truth of this story, but maybe a little pizza is not a bad thing.

Re:Pizza

[baggins2001]

Man you've never had a pizza that was crisped in the 1200 C first ox furnace.
That oxidation layer seems to really hold in the taste, while you get the crispiest crust ever.
The only thing better is a hot pocket. Which happen to fit well on the quartz trays for holding wafers. You can then stick them all the way in to furnace on a cantilever arm.

Lead free

[Anonymous Coward]

But they are lead free, which is good for us.

Re:Lead free

[sexconker]

They have less lead, but they still have lead.

Fair and Balanced?

[wombatmobile]

"Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen"

-5 Troll

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure you would say the same if Toyota produced cars whose brakes would fail if you used them for an extended period of time.

Granted, the example is a little extreme but why shouldn't Nvidia get a public flogging by the press when they have been, are and probably will continue to lie about this issue?

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, of course you wouldn't hold my breath, only I can do that.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

THEY can't hold MY breath anyway...

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[bogie]

Maybe so, but to an outsider they do have a lot of interesting statements about the changes Nvidia made to their hardware recently. Either the 8-K statement is business as usual in the chip market(I'm not expert on this) or it is an indication that larger problems loom. We'll know for sure if over the next month or so we start seeing massive amounts of failing gpus.

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/080702/nvda8-k.html

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[AcidPenguin9873]

The person who submitted this story to Slashdot left out an important link on that text from the original Inquirer article (linked again here for your convenience). In the original story, that sentence reads:

Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen.

At that link, you'll find The Inquirer's (however flimsy and speculative) financial analysis of a full-scale Nvidia recall of the bad parts.

The Inquirer doesn't and has never claimed to be a fair and balanced news source, so they are free to put these sorts of quips on their stories. People there are pretty knowledgeable, and appear to have connections and sources in the industry, which is why people keep reading The Inquirer and don't really complain about stuff like that.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anyone, including The Inquirer, has ever claimed The Inquirer was "Fair and Balanced".

And seeing a comment like that on Slashdot makes me think we have pot kettle situation here :)

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds fair and true to me. Are you saying it's not a true statement? Honestly you haven't said much. Wanting balance is stupid. I want as little bias in news reporting as possible. Balance can be a huge for of bias when one party is clearly in the wrong, like here. We don't give convicted murderers equal time and balanced reporting. We say they did XYZ and now XYZ will happen. Same here. Nvidia messed up and has hardly begun to make things right and probably cannot afford to fix this mess. The July SEC filing looks really very low balled to me. Sure they can avoid bankruptcy by selling the company and changing the name like most hard drive makers do when caught like this, but that hardly counts.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Bert64]

There's a big difference between a car with failure of engine or brakes, and a videocard with a failing GPU...
Failing brakes could kill you, or others, the legal fallout could easily bankrupt a company making such cars...
On the other hand, the engine or brakes make up a relatively small part of the overall cost of a car, replacing them would still be expensive but it's unlikely to bankrupt an auto maker. They are also much easier to repair than the inner workings of a silicon chip, so there's no need for thousands of units to be scrapped.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[houstonbofh]

Yeah, I'm sure you would say the same if Toyota produced cars whose brakes would fail if you used them for an extended period of time.

And I am pissed about it. My breaks failed and needed replacement at 40k and again at 80k! And it was denied warranty! Bastard car makers!

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Sloppy]

THEY can't hold MY breath anyway...

Have you checked the driver source to make sure? Oh sorry, I forgot: you can't.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[snowraver1]

Are you sure you havn't pissed someone off?

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[houstonbofh]

Thats it! Someone I ticked off is sneaking in and sanding down my pads! Bastards...

Thanks for the tip!

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Sipper]

Auto makers generally operate on a 1% profit margin, so a major design flaw with the engine could bankrupt them (and several of them are pretty close to that as it is!). You are assuming that the engine could be modified after-the-fact to fix the theoretical issue...

Likewise on the other side of the coin, some silicon chips *can* be modified to a very limited extent after manufacture.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[moderatorrater]

There's also a big difference between eating a loss and going bankrupt. The loss is going to be big, yes, but NVidia's flying high right now with some great cards out. If they were to embrace the failure and own the mistake like Microsoft did with the RROD, then they could continue to fly high. The XBox360 has negative press, but for the most part people aren't unwilling to buy one because they know that Microsoft will make good on the warranty without any fuss at all. If NVidia keeps avoiding the issue, then they're going to have a PR nightmare while ATI's opening their driver and starting to get competitive again.

In other words, I see NVidia's choice being either eating a big loss now or eating a big loss as people flock to ATI and maybe stay there. NVidia's been on a roll lately, and avoiding the issue's the best way to screw that up.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Keith Russell]

People there are pretty knowledgeable, and appear to have connections and sources in the industry, which is why people keep reading The Inquirer and don't really complain about stuff like that.

*cough* Rydermark! *cough*

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

My mother is a car maker, you insensitive clod!

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[lukas84]

1% margin on car? Any sources?

Can't believe this.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[jjrockman]

He did say "generally".

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not many vehicle warranties I've seen cover parts that are specifically designed to wear. i.e., brake pads, tires, windshield wiper blades, etc.

I've learned that one the hard way myself.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[orasio]

Met Lord Vader, you have not yet.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Dogtanian]

Well, of course you wouldn't hold my breath, only I can do that.

Darth Vader finds your lack of faith disturbing.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

Failing brakes could kill you, or others, the legal fallout could easily bankrupt a company making such cars...
On the other hand, the engine or brakes make up a relatively small part of the overall cost of a car, replacing them would still be expensive but it's unlikely to bankrupt an auto maker.

You sell cars for a living, don't you?

As for me, if a salesman told me that, pointing out that; "There's only a small 15% chance that your brakes or engine won't work after you drive it off the lot," I doubt I'd be in a rush to sign the sales agreement. I'd also sure ask about all the fine details of the warranty- if not the location of a different manufacturer's salesroom.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen

Life isn't fair.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/moms/5972576.html

Simplicity made several baby bassinets that could apparently fold up into different designs. The bassinet had bars on it that were far enough apart (farther than federal regulations) that baby's head could fit through and get stuck, causing the baby to choke and die. They recalled one line of bassinets, and promptly went bankrupt from the cost. Another company, SFCA bought Simplicity out, and rather than recall the rest of the bassinets, they declared that they're not responsible for the products Simplicity produced (despite purchasing the company).

Nobody's "holding their breath" for this other company to do the recall. Pointing this fact out isn't "unfair" or "unbalanced", it's the truth. Fortunately, the retailers are "doing the right thing" even though they'll likely have to eat the cost of Simplicity's screwup themselves.

What was the line from Fight Club? About X being less than the cost of the recall? That bottom line is how many companies work, whether you are ashamed of it or not.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[darkwhite]

I don't understand why a full recall would be needed. Most cards in desktops are completely stationary, which drastically reduces the likelihood of failure due to interconnect stress, and many are not even thermal cycled often (e.g., computer always on, no stressful games), which is the other big source of physical stress on the interconnects. If the failure rates are in the teens, the reasonable solution is to extend the warranty to cover all instances of interconnect failure e.g. 5 years from sale, which is a lot cheaper than a recall.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[asc99c]

I know a lot of countries don't really seem to have 'tabloid' news in the same style as the UK. It's bascially news stuffed full of gossip, opinion and humour. Think Fox news, but more extreme and without the pretence of neutrality.

The Inquirer is not and never has been fair and balanced. It's the only IT tabloid news I know of though. The Register has moved (a little) upmarket since Mike Magee et al left for the Inquirer.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[QuantumHobbit]

I think that depends on the auto maker. I've heard that Toyota gets $2000-3000 profit on a car that costs $25000. 10% margin. But GM with its legacy pensions and less desirable cars, which have to be sold cheaper, only gets a few hundred. $300 profit on a $30000 sedan seems ridiculous. But considering that GM makes more money from its financing business than actually selling cars so %1 profit is possible.

Re:Fair and Balanced?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a big difference ...

No there's not. Stop making these ridiculous comparisons. It's all down to the people that hold and want the shares. NVIDIA shares

Intel...

[faragon]

...to buy Nvidia? Problem solved.

Re:Intel...

[faragon]

It is paradoxical, I said almost the same four months ago (@20080417)... and partially taken also as "funny", however, I was also speaking seriously.

Re:Intel...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Actually, follow the money.

In this case I'd look for someone shorting NVidia stocks in hopes of making a killing when Intel buys it.

See also: Sudden release of deaths-by-Taser stories right after Taser, Inc. goes public. Someone shorting, or didn't get pay-yay-yaid.

Re:Intel...

[jacquesm]

that's exactly where my thoughts are going with this, it looks like a paid corporate hit to me.

Re:Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

You paranoid clod!

Re:Intel...

[mvdwege]

Ahem. A buyout usually has a premium over the current share price. In other words, if a buyout is hanging over the market, the expected trend is up. Only a fool shorts when the price is likely to go up.

In this particular case, shorting would have been a defensible move if done before the bad news coming out. However, that raises the question on how you time that without relying on insider knowledge (and consequently having the SEC come knocking).

In any case, buying long options, either put or call, depending on your analysis of the future of the stock, is a better bet in almost all cases. Shorting is for suckers.

Mart

Re:Intel...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shorting is for suckers.

Unless you know for sure that the stock is overvaluated because the company can not fight in equal conditions... who can honestly think that Nvidia can fight alone in the long term versus AMD/ATI?

Are you a betting man?

[Sj0]

If you're a betting man, now's a good time to pick up on Nvidia stock.

The question is, do you feel lucky, punk?

Re:Are you a betting man?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already "invested" in Nvidia. I paid extra for this crap in may most recent laptop purchase. I see no reason to go double or nothing.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[martinw89]

I'm not exactly going to pick up NVDA, but I may sell it shorter than the 55nm process used on these chips!

Re:Are you a betting man?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you're a betting man, now's a good time to pick up on Nvidia stock.

The question is, do you feel lucky, punk?"

Yes, Nvidia is worth a lot more then it currently is, if you don't think so you haven't been paying attention. Good investors look at the circumstances, if nvidia somehow stops being a good company (Execution, etc), then investors will bail, but good investors, make money on the waves the rises and falls, and get out before the damage occurs.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[edxwelch]

You mean now is the time to short Nvidia?

Re:Are you a betting man?

[Cheeko]

Or you could short the stock if you think word will eventually get out and they'll be forced to take action.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[szquirrel]

If you're a betting man, now's a good time to pick up on Nvidia stock.

The question is, do you feel lucky, punk?

Absolutely. Nvidia is getting hammered lately but they aren't stupid and they aren't poor. They have $1.6 billion on hand to weather this storm.

I wouldn't be surprised if they sold off their chipset business to refocus on high-end, high-margin GPUs, but they aren't done yet by a damn sight.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[kesuki]

actually, wall street hasn't yet factored in the possibility of 20% of nvidia's high to mid end chips being totally reject chips yet.

so a betting man would watch the stock closely for the next few weeks, then when it bottoms buy massive quantities of stock.

this is the kind of a massive chip recall scenario which makes nvidia a likely buyout target by say Intel (everyone likes buying a company at a fraction of the value of the company, which is why M$ worked so hard to try and take over yahoo)

for those saying it's only the chip that is the problem, it's very expensive to remove and replace a chip, because normally the chips are all factory produced on a robotic assembly line, and they're only designed to put the chips on, not take them off. you need people to remove chips, making a massive recall a very expensive option. then there are those who will want their chips recalled, even if the chip was working fine for months, and might be a random lucky working chip.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[einer]

No. Good great jebus no... Do NOT buy nvidia stock right now. They're sitting on a product they can't sell and waiting for a buyout that will NOT get them fair value for their shares.

Consider them to be a home owner in today's market, and you buying stock in them, as investing in the financial future they can make for themselves, with what they have, in this environment.

SHORT TO ZERO. This is not a long.

I have no disclosures to make.

Re:Are you a betting man?

[mvdwege]

That's stupid advice. Buying stock is a limited risk, if they tank, you're out you're initial investment, if they don't, you take the profit. Shorting is an unlimited risk, you have a limited profit (the difference between your short price and 0), and if they don't tank, you're at risk as long as you don't buy back.

Shorting is for gamblers and fools. If you really think they're going to tank, buy put options.

Mart

Re:Are you a betting man?

[darien]

wall street hasn't yet factored in the possibility of 20% of nvidia's high to mid end chips being totally reject chips yet.

They're not "totally reject chips". They just have a tendency to overheat. Possible fixes include a BIOS update to speed up the fan, a BIOS update to underclock the chip (not ideal, but very cost effective) or a better heatsink.

8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[RulerOf]

I've always secretly been an ATI fanboy... and a traitor since the 6800GT.

Now, I've got ATI again but recommended everyone I know (up until 48XX by ATI) buy the 8800 or 9600....

I wanted ATI to regain some track to even the market... but this is a little much. Complete flops are not good for competition either.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

IMNSHO, the quality control at both companies has been terrible for several years now. What's the point of paying a premium for a good graphics card, if hardware problems make your system unstable as soon as a demanding game is loaded or the drivers take out your operating system at random intervals? It's not like this has happened only on bleeding edge cards with new drivers, either: several entire models have had basic incompatibilities with other common system components, and sometimes drivers have been unacceptably poor for the entire useful lifetime of a gamer's card.

Contrary to the marketroid reports, it is not in any way unavoidable that new cards with new drivers have to crash a significant fraction of the hottest games at release time. It's not like these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing, and it's not like the card vendors couldn't co-operate with the game vendors on a beta test programme. This happens because commercially, it makes more sense for them to race to market with inadequately tested hardware and poorly engineered driver software and hope they can patch up any widespread problems later with a minimal PR hit. As long as both the big names are as bad as each other, consumers in the target market are pretty much screwed anyway.

It's about time something like this happened and one of the companies took a major financial hit as a consequence. Perhaps then we'll move back towards supplying hardware and drivers that actually, you know, work. Gamers the world over (other than those currently suffering from these problems, of course) should probably be happy about this, because it might be serious enough this time to make a difference to future quality control, which is much better than a significant fraction of people being disappointed with each new model but never enough of a critical mass to really punish the company that supplied substandard kit.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Fred_A]

IMNSHO, the quality control at both companies has been terrible for several years now. What's the point of paying a premium for a good graphics card, if hardware problems make your system unstable as soon as a demanding game is loaded or the drivers take out your operating system at random intervals? It's not like this has happened only on bleeding edge cards with new drivers, either: several entire models have had basic incompatibilities with other common system components, and sometimes drivers have been unacceptably poor for the entire useful lifetime of a gamer's card.

If they stopped putting out new hardware like mad every other week in order to outbest one another, they could just possibly have time to fix their hardware and drivers.

Just a thought.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Nom du Keyboard]

Complete flops are not good for competition either.

But they could be very good for my AMD stock.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Splab]

No, you are just most likely American. The problem for you guys is as a customer you have next to no rights, very limited warranties removes the need to make proper products.

In EU however, most places now require 2 year warranty, that means all the good hardware is being shipped here because they don't want to be stuck with a customers problem 1,5 years down the road.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[aztracker1]

Most vidcards come with a lifetime warranty (lifetime of that card), since these cards are still in production, should be able to get them replaced by the card mfg... backlash to nvidia is another issue.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Kjella]

The reality is that the market is completely sold on FPS porn. At every release it's about checking out all the graphs of FPS in various games at different resolution/AA/AF settings. It's not like regular development where you most of the time agree some code is "good enough" and leave it at that, everything is being constantly tweaked to push out those last 0.1 FPS here and there. Under those conditions, you just don't get stable software period. Regarding hardware, I hear what you're saying but at the rate technologies come and go the market would be gone by the time the products came to market. nVidia/ATI aren't quite that regular but Intel's got a tick-tock which means you got two years before you need a new stable architecture or a new stable process, neither of which is easy and while silicon revisions happen you don't have the time to do major rework before the next generation is taking over. In short, it's not going to happen until the whole process slows down. Current guesstimates on process tech is that we'll hit some hard limits before 2020, as we'll be running into an extreme amount of ugly quantum effects as we go below 10nm. But even if that slows down, with shaders and larrabees and whatnot happening in graphics, I doubt you'll see calm waters any time soon.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Dogtanian]

No, you are just most likely American. The problem for you guys is as a customer you have next to no rights, very limited warranties removes the need to make proper products. In EU however, most places now require 2 year warranty, that means all the good hardware is being shipped here because they don't want to be stuck with a customers problem 1,5 years down the road.

Absolutely; and if you live within the EU, this- along with the fact that most displayed US prices don't include sales tax (AKA VAT) which is added on- is something to bear in mind the next time you're feeling sore about the difference in cost between the UK (or whatever) and the US.

Although it's arguable that these two issues don't cover the complete difference, the gulf does look much less vast when you take it into account.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[SeaFox]

It's about time something like this happened and one of the companies took a major financial hit as a consequence. Perhaps then we'll move back towards supplying hardware and drivers that actually, you know, work.

The easiest way to do that is to go back to electronics that don't have rewritable BIOS or other operating software. If you don't make it right to begin with -- ho boy, gotta do a recall or settle a class-action lawsuit.

Now that everything can be fixed later, there's no reason to spend market lead time or pay for pre-release testing. Let the consumer do it for you for free.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Rakishi]

If you don't want to have problems from new untested hardware then don't buy cutting edge hardware. It's that fucking simple. If companies took the time to fix all the problems than hardware would be slower which is exactly what you'd get by buying slightly older hardware right now. Of course gamers have the self control of a 2 year old and will buy anything shiny even if it crashes 99% of the time.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Rakishi]

2 year warranty and you like it? Wow, you're getting ripped off. I'd love to find out whomever managed to delude a whole continent that way just so I can bask in their cunning.

I don't think anything in my system has under a 3 year warranty and some things are much higher than that (hard drives are 5 years, video card is probably lifetime, etc.). Of course if I want to take the risk I can buy things with much shorter warranties but that's my choice then. Seem that customers on this side of the pond are intelligent enough to not buy the 30 day warranty products every time like mindless sheep.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

As I said pretty clearly, I thought, in my previous post, it's not that simple at all. There are plenty of examples where a particular graphics card has never become useful.

Sometimes a pattern of poor quality has become apparent only a few months after a model has been released, not because the card was OK to start with, but just because it took a while to track down the problem. ATI cards and Asus motherboards had some slightly out-of-spec problems with the power connections for a while, for example.

Sometimes the vendor has just never got the drivers up to scratch and certain games have therefore always been unplayable with that card.

But because each individual fault has affected only a relatively small part of the market (players of certain games that triggered driver problems, people whose PCs used certain hardware with less tolerance for out-of-spec graphics cards...) the graphics card companies have basically ignored anything that seemed like too much effort to fix. Being cutting edge really doesn't have much to do with it.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most vidcards come with a lifetime warranty (lifetime of that card), since these cards are still in production, should be able to get them replaced by the card mfg... backlash to nvidia is another issue.

I have purchased my last 2 cards from EVGA due to their lifetime warranty. When my 6800 died this year they returned a 7800 to me as the 6800 line is obsolete.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[Splab]

Erm... what?

The 2 year warranty is guaranteed by law, distributors are free to do what they want on top of that, like my RAM has lifetime warranty; but those warranties are supplied by the manufacturer, not by the shop - the 2 year here is the shop, you hand it in they have to figure everything out.

And mindless sheeps? wtf? It's in the US you get that "option" of being screwed over; not sure how that part fits in with anything.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[gaspyy]

You're trolling big time.
Two year warranty is minimum required by law. Lots of items sell with longer warranties.

Re:8800 and the 9600... Ouch.

[aztracker1]

Nice.. I've been mostly buying eVGA, BFX, and Asus vidcards lately myself.. so good to know evga is carrying beyond the lifetime of the card, as I know some do.

Learning from the meat packing industry

[A beautiful mind]

Basically, the meat packing industry's favourite tactic is that when some contamination, like salmonella is found in the meat they will just sit on it. If the media gets wind of the story, they'll voluntarily recall a small fraction of the meat unfit for human consumption.

At least Nvidia by doing the same thing is not directly endangering human lives...

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[A beautiful mind]

and is not as big of a deal in most countries outside of the U.S.A

That is because outside the USA, it has been virtually eradicated from livestock. Sweden began a program to do so more than 40 years ago and now less than 0.1% of Swedish cattle is infected with Salmonella. Compare that to the US with 2.1%...

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[kegger64]

Got a source for this? I can't believe that one in fifty cattle in the US has Salmonella.

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[G00F]

Same, I've always heard the US is better in that regard, our problem is E.Coli, and really the super strains of it.

Heck, I've eaten enough raw eggs in the form of cookie dough that even a %1 chance would have gotten me.

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[djrogers]

Raw eggs in the US run about 1:20,000-1:40,000 chance of salmonella, and a healthy adult is capable of fighting off the amount of salmonella in the average tainted egg.

WRT to beef though, salmonella poisoning by beef is almost completely unheard of - chicken yes, beef no. Where this whack job got his numbers from is anyone's guess but they are wrong.

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[darthnoodles]

Tell that to Maple Leaf Foods. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080821/maple_leaf_list_080821/20080825?hub=Specials

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[steelfood]

This is a poor analogy. I advice you read up on diseases caused by salmonella before bringing something as completely unrelated as this.

First off, salmonella is only deadly to people with weak or weakened immune systems, effectively, infants, the elderly, and people with HIV or take immunosuppressents. Hogging up the bathroom and leaving a nasty stink is otherwise the worst symptom salmonella will cause in the average, healthy individual.

Second, salmonella dies when you cook the meat it's in. Since you might not have ever had to do any cooking, let me inform you that chicken and pork should both be thoroughly cooked before consumption. And it is generally discouraged to eat raw eggs. Steak is considered safe because it goes through pasteurization.

Third, most healthy people need to consume a certain amount of salmonella bacteria to even feel the symptoms. That's why it's still safe for children to eat raw cake batter. And it's also why it's ok for most adults to consume chicken and pork that's not completely cooked on the inside. Again, you might not know this, but how much of the bacteria you can consume before you feel the effects is tied to the amount of exercise an adult gets in a day.

Finally, salmonella has to be injested. Which means as long as you wash your hands before eating (you do do that, don't you?), there's very little chance of you getting sick from you having touched unclean things. And despite what television ads say, salmonella can't just live off dry, clean surfaces. It needs organic matter to continue to survive, or it will die within an hour or so.

Yes, GPU's failing won't kill anyone while salmonella has had fatalities (and it varies by strain). But please stop spreading FUD about things you know little to nothing about.

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[rahvin112]

I suppose you tell that to the people that died from the Seattle area Jack-in-box hamburger meat that was contaminated by salmonella. I don't remember the number of fatalities (in the low single digits) but the nearly 200 people that got intensely sick for a several weeks would probably contest that point with you.

Salmonella poisonings linked to beef are indeed rare but Salmonella is a principle community member of the bovine intestinal system and if proper hygiene measures aren't used during slaughter and processing the spread of contamination is highly probable.

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[PTBarnum]

Are you sure you aren't thinking of E.Coli? That fits your description of being commonly found in the bovine intestinal system, and being the cause of a food poisoning outbreak in Seattle at Jack in the Box.

http://www.billmarler.com/key_case/jack-in-the-box-e-coli-outbreak/

Re:Learning from the meat packing industry

[rahvin112]

Your right, disregard my comment. E.Coli it was. Salmonella is a poultry disease.

Still Not Buying It

[RetiefUnwound]

I've got a two 8800 series cards (one 8800GT, one 8800GTS), and I live in a place with no air conditioning. If these cards were subject to heat failure the way the Inquirer has been hollering about - one or both would have died by now. Particularly the one in my wife's computer - it's a Shuttle box, which runs toasty. It's been rock solid, running 24/7 for more than a year now.

I'm not suggesting there is NO problem - but the Inquirer has been talking about this like all of these cards are just waiting to die. With no A/C, and temps in the house above 90F during the summer, they should be dead if the Inq is to be believed. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I still aint buying the story.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[neo8750]

I to own a 8800GTS and a 8800GS neither of which have any problems and both of the boxes are on 24/7

Re:Still Not Buying It

[mandark1967]

Actually, if your wife's computer runs 24/7 it would be less susceptible to the problem since the problem they are experiencing is exacerbated by thermal cycling. fewer cycles of heating up and cooling down = less of a chance to fail.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Curien]

They say failure rates are "in the teens percent". Figure 20%, just for kicks. That means your chances of either card failing is 1 - (1 - .2)(1 - .2) = 36%.

For some reason that I don't understand, the vast majority of people have innate misconceptions of the rules of probability.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Cheeko]

Well for starters they said its a failure rate in the teens. The odds even with 2 cards that 1 would fail is still less likely than not.

Also the 8800 cards have been out for a while. The impression I get is that this is a newer issue with the cards, so initial 8800 cards might not be an issue.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've got a two 8800 series cards (one 8800GT, one 8800GTS), and I live in a place with no air conditioning. If these cards were subject to heat failure the way the Inquirer has been hollering about - one or both would have died by now. Particularly the one in my wife's computer - it's a Shuttle box, which runs toasty. It's been rock solid, running 24/7 for more than a year now."

I disagree somewhat, the older 8800 GTS, is prone to overheating and graphical artifacts in certain games. In crysis if I play for too long I have to shut down the PC for a while, playing certain games that stresses certain parts of the GPU (i.e. heats it up), causes a lot of artifacts.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Tridus]

This sounds like what Xbox fanboys were saying when word of the 360 being defective reached a fever pitch.

"Well, MINE works fine, you all must be using it wrong!"

Course a week later Microsoft admitted to it and shelled out $1 billion.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

just to provide anecdotal "evidence" on the other side, a friend of mine has a laptop with one of the affected chips in it and he said the video artifacting he's encountering was there almost from day one and quite annoying (though i believe he said it mainly only crops up when playing flash video). it's quite a bit worse when he's on battery power. he could just keep it on mains, but that does sort of defeat the purpose of having a laptop.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Dunbal]

For some reason that I don't understand, the vast majority of people have innate misconceptions of the rules of probability.

      Yourself included, since card failure is an independent event. The chance of any card failing is - tadaa, 20%. Just like if I have 3 dice, the chance of rolling a number is 1/6. If I roll it again, the chance is still 1/6. It will always be 1/6.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[SomeJoel]

Yourself included, since card failure is an independent event. The chance of any card failing is - tadaa, 20%. Just like if I have 3 dice, the chance of rolling a number is 1/6. If I roll it again, the chance is still 1/6. It will always be 1/6.

I'm not sure what you are talking about with this unrelated dice example, but the GP is correct. The chance of neither failing is .8 * .8 = .64. The chance of at least one failing is therefore 1 - .64 = .36. 36%, as the guy said. Where did you go to school again? For your dice example, here is a more analogous one: If I roll a six-sided die 3 times, what are the chances it will come up "6" at least once? Chance of it not being six at all = 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 = 125/216 (~.58). The chance of it coming up 6 at least once is ~(1 - .58) or roughly 42%.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[scorp1us]

Let's not forget that 2d performance does not cause thermal loading. It is 3d loading that you pay for and is what creates all the heat. What you need to do is play a 3d game, exit, return repeatedly. This will get the heat expansion and cooling which will eventually cause failure.

If you're in all 3d, all the time, then you still won't subject it to the stresses.

The worst thing you could do is play a game, and shut down the computer immediately. This would result in the most significant wear scenario.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[mercthree]

Why do you think Vegas has multi-billion-dollar "hotels"?

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

Which maths are you using to assertain your 2 cards indeed 15%'ers?

2 cards seems like a very small sample size to state your level of confidence in these parts.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Chirs]

If you roll one die, the chance of getting a specific number is 1/6.

If you roll three dice, the chance of getting a specific number on *any* of the dice is higher, around 0.42.

In the case of the original poster, there is an 0.8 probability of a single card being good. Given two independent trials, the chances of both being good are 0.8*0.8=0.64. Thus, the probability of at least one card being bad is 0.36, or 36%.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[SlashSnot]

How does your 2 card experience relate to the "failure rate in the teens" mentioned in the article? The Inquirer has NOT been talking about this like all of these cards are just waiting to die - they are talking about 15 in a hundred or so...

Re:Still Not Buying It

[TypoNAM]

I seem to be having a similar problem with my PNY GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB GDDR3 x16 PCI-E card. It randomly happens after a few hours of playing Call of Duty 4 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. where it seems the RAMDAC freaks out or something and I end up with random colored chasing four pixel long horiztonal lines covering the entire screen on both monitors (using a dual-monitor setup consisting of a viewsonic CRT at 1024x768 @ 85Hz via VGA port and a Dell Ultrasharp LCD at 1680x1050 @ 60Hz via DVI port) with lightning or strobing highlighting effects on particular scenes such as the clouds in the CoD4 main multiplayer menu.

Now to test to see if it's the GPU or RAMDAC (not sure if they're apart of the same chip) I take entire desktop screen shots and even ran FRAPS during the problem, and looked at the screen shots and video, nada. Doesn't show the problem at all (after I have rebooted of course) which means its the processs of getting the video to the monitors which the best of my knowledge would be the RAMDAC. The only fix is to close out the games and do a system suspend, wake back up, and restart the game. Always works and the problem won't return for at least another 30 minutes. Of course doing a full reboot works too, but takes longer to bring everything back up. :)

I have ran Everest to monitor both voltages and GPU tempature and it doesn't appear to be a voltage (seems to be constant and not going all over the place) or heat related issue. I would have already RMA'd to get a replacement card, but I am hesitant to RMA the card since well PNY is well known for its lack of a customer friendly RMA department and I could end up with a worse replacement card than the one I have now.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that solves it then, since these are new chips probably purchased by the hard-core gamers who want the "best of the best" at all times, its not a problem - because they'll be sitting in front of their machines playing WoW 24/7, through the job loss, divorce, and whatever else. No thermal cycling at all!

Re:Still Not Buying It

[The Gaytriot]

I have an 8800gts (refurb. replacement for my 7900gtx) that runs awesome. I bought my brother a 8800gts 320mb version which gets regular artifacting in games, but from what I know artifacting geometry and textures are usually a result of a bad memory module.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[The Gaytriot]

I had the exact same thing happening with my old 7900gtx. It only happened that way in STALKER, other games suffered from typical texture artifacting and sometimes geometry artifacting. I had come to the conclusion that I had one bad vRAM module on the board, because even after liquid cooling the card and running it under 50C the artifacts did not go away. I should mention that the memory was not liquid cooled, only the GPU.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Bryansix]

Ha! Well two of mine broke right in a row. The failure rate was actually much higher then a measly "in the teens percent". It was more likely 25% or higher that failed in the first year and a half of ownership.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[dave562]

I think the real issue is with laptops. I finally caved in and bought a MacBook Pro. It has a 8600GT card. After about ten minutes of playing video games on it the case gets so hot that you can't even touch it. There isn't enough cooling capacity in the notebook to keep the card cool. I'm sure that the thing is going to fail. I spent an extra couple hundred bucks to get a three year extended warranty from Best Buy. I figure when the chip fails I can go trade in the laptop and get a new one.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[ChuBie]

I have an 8800GT and the box is powered off every night to save energy. No problems so far and it is approx a year old.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using NVidia since my last run in with ATI over there cheap and overated All in Wonder 9800 Pro which didnt get the job done even though it had the same specs as the card I replaced it with GeForce 7800GT. I will whether the storm with NVidia I have had 2 8800 GT set sli for 8 months and I have installed tons more and had no failures as of yet. When I start seeing the failures then I ll start questioning the logic and seeing I custom build gaming configurations for a living I'm not buying it yet either.

Cheers,

Captjack

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

It is supposedly being caused by the power cycling of turning on and off. That is why supposedly laptops are having more problems then there desktop counterparts.

With your wife's computer going 24/7 it is not causing that power cycle. I have a laptop and desktop both with 8600s in them and they are turned on and off quite a bit and there is some issues with the both the cards, maybe this is it or maybe not.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[T.E.D.]

Particularly the one in my wife's computer - it's a Shuttle box, which runs toasty. It's been rock solid, running 24/7 for more than a year now.

Doing what? If its just displaying the 2D desktop you'd likely never see a problem. I've run nVidia cards with dead cooling fans for years on such systems with no problems.

A better test would be a good 12 hour full-screen WoW (or FPS) session.

Even if yours works, you could have just gotten one of the good ones. If you RTFA, you'll see that not all units are affected. Part of the point is that they know which ones are potentially defective, but are still shipping them mixed in with the good ones and haven't made it easy for customers to tell.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

They say failure rates are "in the teens percent". Figure 20%, just for kicks. That means your chances of either card failing is 1 - (1 - .2)(1 - .2) = 36%.

For some reason that I don't understand, the vast majority of people have innate misconceptions of the rules of probability.

20% is 1/5 or 0.2. ie: If 20% of all cards are faulty, one in every five cards will be faulty.

If you buy two cards your chances of one of your cards being faulty is 1/5 * 4/5 = 0.16 = 16%

The chances of both cards being fine is:
4/5 * 4/5 = 0.64 = 64%

The chances of both cards being faulty is:
1/5 * 1/5 = 0.04 = 4%

Not sure where 36% comes from.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[flink]

No, the parent got it right. The topic is the chance of *at* *least* one card failing, not any individual card. The chance of an independent event with probability p occurring at least once over n trials is 1 - (1 - p)^n

The individual events are still independent, but the aggregate outcome is not.

Number Of
Failures Probability
0 .64
1 .32
2 .04

Re:Still Not Buying It

[philipgar]

the chance of any single card failing is still 20%. You are correct in this regard, however the parent said the chance that either card fails is 36%. The chance of one or more of your cards failing is not 20% when you have two cards. It's pretty obvious that if you had 100 cards, the chance of one or more of them failing is greater than 20%. The chance that any single card fails however is 20%. Of course, you could be trying to play a stupid semantics game where you imply that either card failing means the cards independently, but that was not the parents intention.

Phil

Re:Still Not Buying It

[sam_paris]

The chance of either card failing is 32% The chance of either card failing OR both cards failing is 36%

Re:Still Not Buying It

[blind biker]

I have a 8800GTS, and it is "mysteriously" failing. I couldn't figure what the heck is with this card. Now I have a hunch.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[mrjimorg]

Yea, but if you continue to use that card then in just a mere 15 more years it's going to fail! OMG, recall!!!!

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Born2bwire]

But your chances of rolling at least one six in one of the three throws is not 1/6, it is 57.9%. The poster was talking about the probability that at least one of the two cards were faulty.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

I purchased an 8800GT card from Newegg just barely less than a year ago. Last weekend I got home from a vacation to find my computer beeping out the 'your graphics card is f*cked up' error code when I booted.

Unfortunately, I went out and bought a 9600GT as a replacement... and now I'm worried :(

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've had these cards for over a year, I don't think they are the 55 or 65nm-process cards. I bought an 8800GTS last year in August, and they only had 90nm-process 8800s up for sale at the time, IIRC.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

Two cards is not that big a sample size... For comparison, my company bought 100 or so 9600GTs earlier this year for installation in a batch of new PCs, and so far more than 20 of them have failed. 20% failure rate is terrible - we've bought big batches of graphics cards many times before and have never had failure rates above 5%.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Dunbal]

That's not what the original poster said. The poster said:

That means your chances of either card failing is

So the chance of card A failing is 20%. The chance of card B failing is also 20%. That people want to dick around and work out probabilities for different scenarios has nothing to do with what the poster wrote. Perhaps his was an error in communication, rather than a mathematical error.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 3 original 9600GTs and 2 original 8800GTs
It gets to about 1C during the night and cards run during the day at around 50C
I personally haven't had an issue with any of the cards, in fact, I had more issues with the 7 and 6 series then I have with these ones.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[coolsnowmen]

You are misinterpreting "either card failing" to mean: 'if you were to pick a random card, what are the chances of it failing.' Sure, lets assume 20%.

That is not the probability in question. It should be translated to: Given N cards, what is the probability that 1 or more have failed.

The answers can be found from p_f = 1 - (.8)^n
So for one card: 20%
Two cards: 36%
Three cards: 48.8%
infinite amount of cards: 100%

Re:Still Not Buying It

[omglolbah]

It is math.

Sadly it isnt "cool" to know it...

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with 8 series is heat cycling and it shows up no laptops the most. The issue with desktops is that they havemuch better airflow than laptops and the gpu's don't get as hot. Wait until the warranty expires, they give the cards approximately 3 years at average on and off use.

That's on and off, not 24/7 on. The components warp.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if your wife's computer runs 24/7 it would be less susceptible to the problem since the problem they are experiencing is exacerbated by thermal cycling. fewer cycles of heating up and cooling down = less of a chance to fail.

Wow, I'm an idiot, i directly replied above without reading this. My mistake.

Need more sleep.

Re:Still Not Buying It

[nblender]

I have an 8800 based card that died. It's in a Shuttle in one of my mythfrontends... It was running 24/7 for maybe a year. There, that's at least one data point. Lets string 'em up...

Personally, I just replaced the shuttle with a MacMini running Debian and mythfrontend... Works great and is quieter.

A Grain of Salt

[Colonel Korn]

I don't get people who show any sort of devotion to a GPU manufacturer. I just don't. The author of this article is one of them. That doesn't mean it's not true, but he's written a number of articles that later proved to be completely false in the past, for instance saying that the 8800 series would doom nV because of low performance and high power usage compared to the 1900 or 2900, whatever ATI was releasing at about the same time. I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[bughunter]

Yea, but a lot of people show devotion to their notebook computer manufacturers, who hardwire these chips onto the mobos.

Like, say, the Apple MacBook Pro and its nVidia GeForce 8600M GT, for instance.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[eebra82]

I don't get people who show any sort of devotion to a GPU manufacturer. I just don't.

It's just like buying a car, being satisfied with the purchase and put the car maker in favor of others when you consider your next purchase. I hate car analogies, but this one fits.

On the other hand, there are different levels of devotion. Some people explicitly hate one of the companies and favor their products even when it is not maintaining a lead. That kind of devotion is just silly, unless you have an uncle employed there.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not loyal to nVidia I just enjoy the fact that nVidia's windows drivers are more stable then the alternatives and nVidia's cards work in Linux with out all the quirks, bugs and problems that I have been subjected to with ATI

Re:A Grain of Salt

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some good reasons for favouring nVidia over AMD/ATI for "3D" products.

For instance THEY ACTUALLY DO 3D.

I've got shutter glasses, and though the support is not where it should be AT LEAST THEY TRY.

ATI does 2dish 3D. Until I see depth, we are all just fooling ourselves, and I can see depth TODAY with nVidia

Re:A Grain of Salt

[Walter Carver]

Nvidia has better Linux drivers. Everyone I know that used Linux blasts because they bought ATI. ATI is now opening specs so in time we might see better drivers. Can't wait for that.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[linuxpng]

Yeah and I've had 2 of them go bad. One in a 15 inch and one in a 17 inch.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[AmberBlackCat]

I pretty much turned against Nvidia several years ago when they had an essay contest to win a high-end graphics card. The contestants had to write an essay about innovative ways to use an Nvidia card. I entered with an essay that was on the level of the ones I typed for my college assignments, about ways the card could be used. Then I found out the winning essay was by some guy that said he was a DJ and needed good graphics for playing music at his parties. Fuck you Nvidia.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going for completely false. Pretty much the author seems to be extrapolating that because nVidia has changed a manufacturing process, and hasn't provided him with the reason, all chips listed are faulty. It is a remote possibility, but there are hundreds of other things it could be. Lets wait for something a little more solid than "they changed something and won't tell me why" before get out the tar and feathers.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[tims1955]

back on june 16 you mentioned looking for the illustration for a poem written by my dad. the poem was called datawocky and you said it was insipid. for the time i believe it was rather well written. i will forward to you a copy with illustration if still interested. jack stack left us on aug 10, 2008 at the age of 80. tim stack t@staxtech.com

Re:A Grain of Salt

[bughunter]

Aye, I used 'a bit insipid,' but only to describe a possible impression out of context of the illustration. Perhaps another word would have been a better, though no single word is adequate. For a long time, Datawocky was one of my favorite pieces of geek culture, and I look back on it with nostalgia.

My sincere condolences on the passing of your father; I lost my father years ago so I know how hard it can be. And please accept my apologies if my choice of words offended. I feel fortunate that you, the author's son, found my remark and am thrilled that you have replied with such an offer. I would treasure a copy of that article.

Re:A Grain of Salt

[Anonymous Coward]

I do, because ATI has had and still has crap drivers which is no way, shape, or form ever make up for the slight performance lead that their products rarely have. These low quality drivers are even more pronounced when using another OS, say linux for example, not to mention their laggardly OpenGL support.

As to costs: nVidia isn't exactly a high margin operation here other than on their higher end parts likely and surely they don't sell enough of them to eat a major cost of replacing all of these parts. Probably the most money that ATI/nVidia ever make on a product is when they have a contract to design and produce a GPU for a console although even then, those contracts are likely heavily loaded on the front-end.

Sounds like they're having a problem with packaging/final assembly changes that they made for some reason or other and didn't adequately test the parts before manufacturing in quantity. Could also be a problem with their sub-contracted fabbers as IIRC both ATI & nVidia outsource all of their chip fabrication to a third company or two, because also IIRC the same 3rd party was making both nVidia and ATI parts at one time or another.

Inflammatory?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, I think the article is pretty much right on. This is a disaster, and you can bet your ass faulty parts are still being pushed through to unsuspecting users.

Charlie Demerjian

[Qhartb]

I stopped reading when I got to "By Charlie Demerjian."

Seriously, this guy is to NVIDIA as Jack Thompson is to video games. It's just not as common knowledge that you shouldn't take him seriously.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[unsigned integer]

Could someone explain just what exactly the chip on his shoulder is?

Did a nvidia graphics card molest him as a child?

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Sockatume]

He also has a huge chip on his shoulder about Vista and a strange tick of exclusively referring to it as "Windows MeII", as in "Windows Millenium 2". Except in their font it is indistinguishable from "Windows Mell", as in Windows M[e]llenium. He also refers to Windows 7 as "Windows Mell SP1a", from his insider knowledge that "WINDOWS 7, AKA Me II SP1a, is [...] simply a warmed over Vista", furthering confusion as he discusses the inevitable failure of the first service pack of an operating system from almost a decade ago.

Put it this way, I don't think he has the reader in mind when he writes articles.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Rufus211]

Years ago (like 5 years or something) he got some official info from NV and then turned around and leaked it. In response NV stopped having any official contact with the Inq, Charlie specifically. Charlie took this personally or something and has been on a vendetta against NV ever since.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear hear.
The Inquirer take every opportunity to slag off nVidia, Intel, and Sony's PS3 in favour of ATI, AMD, and MS' XBox 360. They're just a retarded bunch of fanboys who wouldn't know reality until it mowed them down and then reversed back over them.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[HardCase]

Yeah, I'm not getting it either - Sn63Pb37 is pretty standard solder. I mean, if you're going to speculate about problems, why not suggest that Nvidia got a better deal on new solder? Or found that they got better performance out of a different solder?

Given that Nvidia wouldn't tell Charlie Demerjian that the sky is blue, anything he says is just guessin'.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who RTFA, I can say I agree. I didn't know this guy before, but I think I understand the data that he's quoting better than him.

He really is just throwing wild speculation out there. It appears that NVDA is just switching to low-lead solder.

Somewhere on the 'net I remember reading about a recent solder failure issue related to the new RoHS solder (probably not on graphics cards), but not the higher-lead solder. Maybe someone can refresh me on that...

If Charlie had data that backed up his assertions, like the one about "higher than normal" failure rates for desktop graphics cards, he would have put it in the article. A good editor would have screened the article better. A better Firehose process should have weeded this out.

I call FUD on this. Wikileaks or it didn't happen...

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[donniejones18]

Or that NVIDIA switched to a solder with less Lead (Pb) content to comply with RoHS standards and improve its environmental friendliness...

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuad has been The Inquirer's middle name when it comes to nVidia for a long time.

The problem isn't "it's only hte gpu, the rest of it works fine," it's the fact that you are all taking an article from The Inquirer seriously. Doubly so since it's about nvidia.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[MoFoQ]

or lost a gf to nv.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Groo Wanderer]

I did. Wow, reading /. you learn something new about yourself every day. Can you tell me anything else about me I didn't know?

          -Charlie

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[XRichard]

So this would explain why essentially no reputable hardware focused news sites (Anandtech, Beyond3d, HardOCP etc.) have picked this up?

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any reference for this? Before then, was he OK with NV?

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[CountBrass]

If that's the case he's leaving himself wide open to a massive defamation or interference with trade lawsuit. Nvidia will be able to fund a full recall with the cash they'd get. ;-)

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

Re:Charlie Demerjian

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for nVidia, I've found Charlie as accurate as he is (sometimes) painful to read. Examples: he was (one of) the first on AMD infamous "Translation lookaside buffers" problem; the first (I know of) to predict AMD would split into a design/engineering company & a manufacturing company; the first to predict AMD would purchase ATI; he was all over Intel when it tried to foist the "Itanic" on the industry; all over Rambus+Intel scam.

Nope, sorry nVidia I'll bet Charlie's (painfully) dead accurate on this one.

a workaround solution

[nimbius]

has been proposed:

buy ati.

Re:a workaround solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Better one has been proposed:

don't read The Inquirer

Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[Animats]

Why is NVidia using lead-based solders at this late date? The European RoHS deadline for lead-free components was back in 2005. The NForce and 8800 parts were RoHS compliant years ago. Are these NVidia parts even exportable to Europe?

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[XanC]

I would say it's because lead-based solder actually works properly, but according to this story that doesn't seem likely to be their motivation.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[petermgreen]

rohs has exceptions for very fine pitch stuff iirc.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[gweihir]

Are these NVidia parts even exportable to Europe?

Very likely not.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[Anonymous Coward]

Leaded solder has several advantages over lead-free solder. First off, lead-free solder is more subject to the formation of whisker-type formations that "grow" out of the solder and can form shorts given enough time.
a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_(metallurgy)" title="wikipedia"> [wikipedia]

I for one am glad they are trying to avoid yet another potential failure mode.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, here's the fixed link.
Whisker_(metallurgy)

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[Tycho]

Yes there is an exception in RoHS for lead solder that has a high melting point. However, the official RoHS rule is that while lead solders in general are prohibited, there is an exception allowing for the use of lead solder that contains at least 90% lead. The idea being that solder with at least 90% lead melted at a higher temperature and was at least somewhat safer if disposed of improperly. Otherwise, potentially there may also have been no replacements for high lead content solders that performed as well when the first RoHS directives were drawn up in 2003. Currently (2008), however, there are lead-free solders that would work, but the lead free solders are more expensive than lead based solders (by roughly three times). Using a lead-free solder with a significantly different composition may also require a new packaging design and another extensive round of qualification, too. I am not totally sure how this would be done.

It get worse, the new solder to be used by nVidia mentioned in this Inq article states that it will only contain 63% lead and 37% tin, making nVidia based cards with this solder not saleable to consumers in the EU according to RoHS directives. The replacement 63Pb/37Sn solder has a somewhat better tensile strength and a lower coefficient of thermal expansion than the older 95Pb/5Sn solder, which may be why nVidia chose this route to fix the problem. Whether nV will be selling very many products in the EU with this fix and whether this will correct the problems, is another issue.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[petermgreen]

I would be very surprised if nvidia hadn't researched the rohs exceptions very carefully and made sure they fitted into one. The very high lead solders exception is far from the only exception.

I find it very unlikely that nvidia would make chips that couldn't be sold in the EU.

Re:Lead-based solders 3 years after RoHS deadline?

[Macman408]

I'd bet that there are both leaded and lead-free versions of the part. That's not an uncommon option to have from a manufacturer. Where I used to work, many chips were going lead-free only, which caused troubles for our leaded designs (we were in communications, which had an exemption).

Hmmm

[Ecuador]

Even though I am an ATI fan (obviously I want nVidia around to drive competition), and I have seen the Inquirer pull off great reports in the past, I still take this with a grain of salt.
First of all, I am not aware of any panic about failed products in the various fora. In cases such as the Red Ring of Death, the Deathstar etc you could not visit a tech forum without having hundreds of people complaining. So maybe the problem is not that big.
Also, the article centers around the fact that they switched from high-Pb solder to a non-lead one. Well, maybe they are switching to environment friendly?
Of course, switching materials a month after launch is highly suspicious. Also, maybe there are failures not at such an alarming rate and also still within warranty so users don't make a big fuss - which would be an indication that a couple of years down the road we might see more failures and out of warranty ones, so it really is a big deal...
Oh, well, we'll just wait and see.

Inq? I'll believe when there's more proof

[JohnnyBigodes]

Yeah, because the Inquirer is such a steady and accurate news source.

I'll believe this when I see more proof.

Re:Inq? I'll believe when there's more proof

[Cylix]

Well I don't think they will go under because of it.

However, I've already been bitten by the 9600 issue.

The turn around on the manufacturer RMA is a bit slow, but I finally have the go ahead to turn it in.

It's a pain to find the reports of people complaining, but they are out there.

Sounds to me like

[Giant Electronic Bra]

The whole thing may well be pretty much balderdash. Then again, we shall see... What really is the point of speculating? Some guy's blog someplace doesn't particularly seem like the height of reliability, then again corps often try to hide dirty laundry. Who knows?

what the hell is with these reports?

[JernejL]

Okay, i hear about supposedly deffective nvidia GPUs all the time now, but why are we not seeing forums crowded with people with these failed graphics cards? i believe this issue is being overblown substantionally out of it's actual proportions.

Re:what the hell is with these reports?

[TheThiefMaster]

What about the "EVE a video card killer" thread on the eve forums: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=731606
I'm willing to bet that this is actually this "high nvidia card failure rate" issue, with a tiny number of people with other cards suffering from ordinary failures.

Re:what the hell is with these reports?

[quazee]

That's interesting.
I noticed that the fan on my ATI card maxes out when staying on a station for an extended period of time. This doesn't happen when playing any other games - perhaps most other games are limited by graphics memory throughput, by CPU, or by arbitrary frame rate limits.
When staying on a station the scene is quite simple - a decent card is able to pump >100 FPS if vsync is off.
OTOH, when not docked on a station, the framerate is clearly CPU-bound, and the fan speed drops to 25%.

Re:what the hell is with these reports?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an HP tx1000 notebook with a 6150/430 nforce GPU... it is dying! The wireless has already gone and it keeps overheating worse and worse (90 degrees C today!)

I'm shipping it to HP next week to be fixed. I'll ask if they can replace the notebook with the newer tx2500 with the ATI/AMD chipset. Wish me luck.

Did they hire people from Weitek?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

To make matters worse, NVidia has a mound of unsold defective parts that they are going to bleed out into the channel along side of the (hopefully) fixed parts.

This sounds very similar to what finally took down Weitek, back when there were a bunch of graphics chip companies competing hotly and being shaken out if they screwed up.

Weitek had built a very fast and powerful chip. But they had goofed: While it had the mandatory basic VGA mode for acquiring the Microsoft certification, there was a bug in it.

QA told management that the bug was there and would fail them. But Software told them a driver could work around it and people would want the chip because it was so fast on graphics rendering. (Of course it could not - because to get the cert it had to work with the stock bootstrap stuff, before a custom driver could be loaded.)

So they went to production with the bug. And the customers got their prototypes, found the bug, and demanded a fix. Eventually they did a fixed version - but had maybe a couple million of the buggy ones on hand and wouldn't sell the fixed ones unless the customer bought some buggy ones, too. So nobody bought and the company folded.

Re:Did they hire people from Weitek?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which chip are you talking about? I know people who worked there until the end and never heard such a story. If it's not the low end W464/W564 then it's long before they went under.

An alternate explanation for why they failed is that they never had a solid long term roadmap and never established good relationships with the PC customers. They were all over the place - they were pretty small for the number of markets that they entered. In their day they did FPUs for high-end SGI machines, FPUs for PCs (not Intel compatible - the socket manufacturers profited the most), RISC chips for postscript printers, Sparc chips for Sun, Graphics chips for workstations and then PCs, and PC chipsets. They were jumping around into different markets like crazy at the end.

After they went under an engineer managed to get rights to their final VGA core (a new design developed in Verilog to replace an older one that) and was selling it to 3D graphics companies that didn't want to bother with the VGA part. I assume that it worked ok, but don't know for sure.

Re:not that big of a deal?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

wooooooooooosh

Not an issue, ATI/AMD is better anyways

[gweihir]

In
  - Driver quality
  - Hardware quality
  - Performance/cost ratio
  - Linux support
  - Compatibility

Just do not buy Nvidia and you should be fine.

Re:Not an issue, ATI/AMD is better anyways

[The Moof]

- Linux support

Really?.

Also, I use FreeBSD. Unless something has dramatically changed with ATI drivers on FreeBSD in the past year, the drive quality argument goes right out the window.

Re:Not an issue, ATI/AMD is better anyways

[gweihir]

Have a close look at the Nvidia Linux support. It sucks.

An, yes, something has dramaticvally changed with ATI in the past year. Was pretty much all over the tech-news too.

Re:not that big of a deal?!?

[ColdWetDog]

what good is the connector and fan if the GPU is dead?

Well, it WAS part of a joke. Now you blew it for everyone else. I hope you're happy.

Re: your brains

[argent]

We're not unreasonable here, nobody's going to eat your eyes.

Re:your signature

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell Taco to allow more characters in sigs...

Re:not that big of a deal?!?

[Briden]

believe it or not, i actually thought he was serious!

Warrenty

[JavaBear]

I'll be bookmarking this one, as I can use this information should my 8800GTS fail within it's first two years of life.

I have no idea how the warranty works in other countries, but here in little old Denmark the producer have the burden of proof the first 6 months (normal warranty) and the user the burden to prove that the unit was defective from the beginning the next 18 months after that. This story is pretty much a carte blance for a replacement on nVidia cards. if they fail in any way :-)

Selling known defective parts

[nurb432]

SHOULD bankrupt them.

Re:Selling known defective parts

[Grimwiz]

Changing solder does not mean parts are defective.

It's not too hard to overstate...

[mooingyak]

It is hard to overstate how bad this is.

This will end all life on earth.

That wasn't hard.

Re:It's not too hard to overstate...

[X_Bones]

You think you're clever, but how the hell am I supposed to kill the Combine when they finally invade?

I mean, Half-Life 2 is a training simulator, right?

Re:It's not too hard to overstate...

[joshtheitguy]

As long as we have a crowbar nearby we will survive.

Re:It's not too hard to overstate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot the fire extinguisher.

I'm all out of gum.

NVidia needs to "just fix it".

[bugfreezer]

Quoting kdawson: "Until NVidia comes fully clean on this fiasco, lists all the defective parts, and orders boxes clearly marked, you can't say anything other than just avoid them. Then again, since doing the right thing would likely bankrupt them, we wouldn't hold your breath for it to happen." I don't suppose the fact that we are now warned of this will have any effect on NVidia's bottom line? I won't be in a hurry to buy an NVidia unit if: a.) there is a good chance it will fry, and... b.) there is a good chance the replacement will fry as well. They need to recall and fix the problem, or they will get bankrupted.

Re:NVidia needs to "just fix it".

[Red Flayer]

Just a quick note, you should cite properly. KDawson was quoting a source (the submitter) who was quoting another source (an author at the Inquirer); you should not attribute that quote to him.

As for whether doing a recall will bankrupt NVidia...

Bankruptcy is when a company is in a negative cash flow position and does not have the assets to meet all of its obligations. It is quite possible that NVidia faces bankruptcy whether they issue the recall or not, and whether they scrap the bad unsold chips or not.

There are four possibilities for NVidia, and they all suck.

Case 1: Ignore the issue. Continue selling bad chips, and only pay to replace chips under warranty when requested. Upside: low cash cost, no big hit to inventory assets. Downside: Reputation down the drain.

Case 2: No recall, but scrap bad unsold inventory. Upside: Better prognosis for brand reputation. Downside: large cash outlay to replace inventory.

Case 3: Recall bad chips already sold, but continue selling bad inventory. This one makes no sense.

Case 4: Issue recall, scrap unsold inventory. Upside: best for brand reputation. Downside: Massive cash outlay.

So, looking at the cases, they have to trade off brand reputation for cash. If they go bankrupt, they are shit out of luck. They are better off not laying out the cash, and trying to win back brand reputation by other means (such as replacing management, or even via a takeover by another company). This would allow them to survive in the short run, and potentially recover in the long run. If they have other chipsets in development not far from production, then they could recover well as long as they make sure to not replicate the problem :)

Re:NVidia needs to "just fix it".

[bugfreezer]

@Red Flayer: I accept that critique, apologies to kdawson and the /. community. I will do better next time.

Other commenters mentioned that the source article, being that it came from the Inquirer and reads like a tabloid, might be all about making mountains out of molehills; what is the actual fail rate data, after all?

Regardless, your case statement is pretty clear, NVidia has to deal with our perception of them as well as the reality of the flawed product lines. I suspect they will smart their way through this.

Not widespread

[cgadd]

Based on personal experience with the 8800 GT boards, I think this problem is vastly overstated... Running 4 of them in my house, and three friends also running them in SLI config, and no failures. That's with the boards overclocked by a bit.

Additionally, failure rates based on NewEgg reviews seem very low (and we all know people love to post a nasty review if they get a bad one).

The cards do run nasty hot, at least until you set the fan to turn on at something under 180F.... who the hell came up with that turn-on temp?

Re:Not widespread

[Knara]

The cards do run nasty hot, at least until you set the fan to turn on at something under 180F.... who the hell came up with that turn-on temp?

Where can you set that particular variable?

Re:Not widespread

[cgadd]

get NTune from here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html

It adds a "tuning" section to the normal NVidia control panel.. gives you access to the GPU and graphics memory clocks, as well as the fan speed. Stock fan speed stays at 30% until the card is over 180F or so... cranked it up to 65%, and I still can't hear the card over my quiet water-cooled system (no video waterblock yet).

Bumped my GPU and memory clock up by 100 mhz each too while I was in there.

Re:Not widespread

[Knara]

Slick. Thanks.

You win...

[Mr. Underbridge]

...for duping the greatest number of people who missed a blatantly obvious joke.

Re:your signature

[Abreu]

Making a philosophy joke hardly qualifies as "promoting a religion"

I'm willing to risk a card failure, IF...

[myspace-cn]

I would be willing to risk a card failure, IF Nvidia open source's the software.

If they open source the soft, I will STFU if my card blows up and even if it kills my Main Board as well. I don't want Nvidia bankrupt.

I am even willing to pay the full price.

I just want to NOT have to go through all the crap to install 3D support in debian. Go ahead and snicker ubuntu...

Let's look at 500GB drives, who hasn't been though the crap shoot on those? 500Gigs of data being lost means someone probably lost 300-400 Gigs of data (Who keeps their drive full) How many times have you had a new 500G drive fail in less than a year? For some reason the 120G's didn't have the same failure problem.

Anyway my 2cents

Both of mine have had problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on my second 8800GT now. On the first one, I started seeing lots of "stuck pixels" (actually sub-pixels, because they were only one color) ... but it wasn't the monitor. I was actually able to take screenshots of the pixels, so I figured it was the card and replaced it.

The second one? Same thing happened. Oddly enough, one of those programs that makes the screen blink endlessly actually fixed it up (except for a single green subpixel which I think is an actual monitor defect).

My system is on pretty much 24-7, but I think I have fairly decent cooling. But this would tend to explain the problems I've been having.

Lifetime warranties rock

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I bought XFX cards with a lifetime warranty :)

Sheesh, is it such a big deal?

[mlwmohawk]

The Intel 486SX was a defective 486DX who's numeric processor was dead or not working.

Most very very large scale integrated chips have defects. Depending on the nature of the defect, they simply categorize the part differently.

A chip is not fast enough for a high speed gaming system? Us it in an embedded device.

Buy it, if it fails, return it. Just because nVidia has issues you know about, don't think for an instant that ATI doesn't.

Re:Sheesh, is it such a big deal?

[sexconker]

Except Nvidia is selling known-bad desktop graphics parts as "good" desktop graphics parts, and known-bad laptop graphics parts as "good" laptop graphics parts.

They quickly paid out money to Dell, HP, etc. and got them to agree to a 50/50 split on the cost of replacing bad parts when they come in.

This isn't about bins and badges, it's about lemons and lies.

Re:Sheesh, is it such a big deal?

[mlwmohawk]

Except Nvidia is selling known-bad desktop graphics parts as "good" desktop graphics parts,

How do you know this? I'd need to see proof, not just commentary and rumor.

Most likely it is just a Q.A. process issue.

Re:Sheesh, is it such a big deal?

[sexconker]

Uh, perhaps you missed the entire debacle about the bad laptop parts, the hush hush from OEMs (deleting comments on forums about the issue, DELL being the exception), and the fact that nvidia is paying half of the cost to replace said parts (cost of parts AND cost of customer care - this is UNHEARD of).

Nvidia's official line is that a small batch of parts expect slightly higher than normal failure rates, but it's because of the OEM designs.

The small batch part was proven bullshit when the news first broke. The slightly higher than normal failure rate was also debunked. Blaming the OEM designs is also bullshit, because all the OEM designs fit within nvidia's own guidelines.

We're also seeing the same problem with desktop parts.

Nvidia knows there is a problem, and there has been NOTHING in the way of a recall, or notifications to customers. ALL that customers get is a bios update that makes the fans run all the time, and a line (filtered through OEMs) saying "We know there is a problem, this update fixes it, if it breaks, we'll replace it as per warranty." All this does is delay the failure (hopefully past warranty) and pass the cost onto the customers.

The fact is all the suspect parts (and there is an ever-increasing list) WILL fail when running anywhere near the higher end of nvidia's guidelines for thermal and electrical constraints. It's just a matter of WHEN these parts will fail.

Re:Sheesh, is it such a big deal?

[Waccoon]

Buy it, if it fails, return it.

That's a lot harder if the chip is hardwired into a laptop.

Faulty?

[Grimwiz]

Changing solder does not prove a chip is faulty. The parts obviously work to the point that everyone testing them had one that functioned correctly.

There are plenty of reasons (e.g. cost, RoHS) that the change could be made.

Re:Faulty?

[sexconker]

But there was no mention of "Going Green!!!" by Nvidia.

Companies milk that shit to no end every chance they get.

Re:Faulty?

[makomk]

Nah - if they were doing it for RoHS, they'd be changing to lead-free solder, not 33% lead. In fact, someone further up seems to reckon the change will cause them RoHS compliance issues, since high-lead solder is allowed under RoHS.

I suppose there could be cost savings, but I would've guessed that the cost (and risk) of changing to a new material would make it not worthwhile.

Re:your signature

[AvitarX]

I would hardly say that sig promotes religion.

It is a humorous little diddy, that mentions God. Please stop the radical atheism (Not necessarily you, but there is a strand of intolerant atheists that force me to say I'm agnostic).

Buying ATI

[Nick Driver]

buy ati

Yeah, someday they might actually release the Glaze3D video cards now that they own BitBoys Oy. Hopefully just in time to be able to play DNF on them.

What a bizzare article...

[sirwired]

I am neither an NVidia or ATI fanboy (heck, my current GPU is an integrated Intel), but this article is a steaming pile of crap.

Somehow, he takes a report of a routine running change to the production process (a new kind of solder), and magically turns this into some wild tale of how NVidia is shipping thousands of defective parts that will remain in the field.

Completely lacking is how he corresponds the running change to some defect...

SirWired

Re:your signature - what is the source?

[bugfreezer]

I'm not at all sure your criticism is based on the correct quotation source; cf: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#The_Gay_Science_.281882.29 Now back to nvidia....

What's the big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears that ROHS regulations require lead-free bumps, and Nvidia is transitioning the product to lead-free bumps. Where's the defect here?

Saw one of these, actually

[phorm]

My buddy was out looking for a Honda Prelude. He found one advertisement that was very much like this. Basically it had

Little to no rust (excellent body condition)

A cd/DVD player

4 LCD screens (headrests, mirror, and passenger)

High-end stereo (speakers/amps/etc)

A blown engine

The guy was selling it for a few grand, and had basically advertised it as "for the value of all the media equipment inside, but you'll need to buy a new engine"

My guess is that the seller "bling'ed" out his car, then drove it too hard and blew a cylinder or a few gaskets.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Cheeko]

If only replacing GPU's was as easy as replacing engines. I'd buy budget graphics cards for like $20/per and slap on some new chips and resell them.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[linzeal]

Lol, and he pry can't repair or replace the engine himself. Whatever happened to kids who could work on both? Where they only a mythological creature that died sometime in the 20th century? As a mech engineer student it disgusts me how little aptitude I am seeing from fellow students that comes from real world knowledge. It is all cerebral, virtual or fantastical this or that from the generation Z kids they suffer from a distinct lack of pragmatism.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Get off you high horse. We all don't have the same aptitude. I couldn't fix anything with moving parts to save my life, never could. But I fuckin' code you ass under the table. OK, that sounded gay, but you get my point.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[mrchaotica]

First, I think a lot of people who would, had they been born 30 years earlier, have been working on cars got into computers instead. Second, some of us weren't fortunate enough to grow up in an environment where we were able to do stuff like work on cars. I, for example, was prohibited from even attempting such a thing because my parents didn't want me to "mess up the garage." They wouldn't even let me so much as change my own oil! And of course, now that I'm no longer living at home I still can't do it because the apartment complex prohibits it too!

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

He was talking about his contemporaries in mechanical engineering, dumbass. It's sad that so many software people are deficient in not only mechanical aptitude, but apparently reading comprehension as well.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Quattro Vezina]

Usually when I hear "blown engine", I think supercharged, not broken.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

i blew a hole in my engine. they said the engine block could still be used. at the time i was still really shocked so i don't remember the details and forgot to take a picture, but the mechanic showed me the hole.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he wasn't, butt-munch. He was patting himself on the back for his perceived superior intelligence. Maybe you should sign up for some of those reading comprehension courses. Sally Struthers could probably help you after you shift at McDonalds.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[Dun Malg]

No, clearly it is you who is the butt-munch. I quote the OP:

"As a mech engineer student it disgusts me how little aptitude I am seeing from fellow students"

He may have been patting himself on the back to some degree, but he was also noting the distinct lack of practical mechanical aptitude amongst his school contemporaries.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[phorm]

Ummm. Well let's see, he's not a mechanical engineering student. He doesn't have any of the tools (it's not like most people happen to have an engine-hoist just kicking around). He rents, and at an apartment, so he doesn't have a garage to work in... and a new engine might be well worth more than the value of restoring the vehicle.

Having done a fair deal of auto-repair work myself I'd have to say this: get a fucking life. It's not all that simple, and it requires tools, time, space and skills that average people don't have.

Re:Saw one of these, actually

[HornWumpus]

We start wrenching on our bicycles not cars. Nobody could stop us even if they tried. My parents sure didn't like my childhood habit of taking things apart to find out how they worked.

But there is generally better money in computers at all levels.

Still it's good to have wrenching skills and tools.

What's the problem here

[confused one]

This is /. for crying out loud. We're all supposed to be geeks, right? This sounds like a solder problem; so, just re-solder the damn chip if it fails. Problem solved... or do we need to revoke a few geek cards?

Re:What's the problem here

[mrjimorg]

Can you resolder a chip back onto a pcb? How many pins does a GPU have? 1000? 10k? You better be a damn good solderer.

Re:What's the problem here

[Anonymous Coward]

Remove the chip with hot air or laser. Clean soldering pads.
Add some sticky flux to pads and mount that chip again. Reflow
one more time and you may get it working again. :-)

Hardest part is removing tin from pads without damaging them
especially if lead free tin is being used... heat, u know.

I do this every week.

Re:What's the problem here

[confused one]

It's a BGA. The GPU might have anywhere from 500-1500 pins, I actually don't know; but that information is available on the data sheet or in the reference design docs.

You solder BGAs using pre-formed solder balls, heating the board and IC, in stages, to bond the solder to the pads. It's a delicate operation; doing it by hand your chances of success aren't too good. I do work with small BGA packages (50-100 pins) and have used hot plates and hot air to reflow them

Oh, and I was kidding...

QA is dead

[wiglebot]

Dell had high return stats because of the G84, G86. QA is dead and Quality is hard to find. I had to buy a freakin 30 year old vacuum to get a quality one that will basically suck up dirt. Did anyone mention Apple's QA problems...

Re:QA is dead

[Knara]

Honestly, Dell has had QA problems for years now no matter what vendor they use (and I say this being a Dell tech myself). On the Optiplex side, their GX260 line had a recall on harddrives, their GX270 line was plagued with leaky capacitors (no recall but also no-questions-asked replacement of mainboards), the GX280 pizzabox systems had some mystery defect combined with really poor air cooling design (the case design hadn't changed since the GX110 days and clearly wasn't sufficient for the CPUs used in the GX280s) that caused them to be very loud and play poorly with some software(??? - don't ask me, but i saw it for months). The 745/755 lines are finally decent machines again.

I think its more a matter of Dell's margins being so slim that they contract with their vendors for specialized-yet-cheap components, and QA is the thing that gets short shrift (keep in mind that in a lot of Dell machines, the videocards are not necessarily standard PCI-E formfactor parts).

Re:not that big of a deal?!?

[longacre]

I believe it.

Re:your signature

[LordKazan]

my apologies if that wasn't your intent, you would be the first person making that joke incompletely without having a religious agenda behind it

Typical Inquirer

[Cythrawl]

But they are saying that all chips are bad from like a two year MFG life-span. I'm very surprised that from within that two years that they are saying that they are all bad now... Wheres the proof?... How do you get it to fail and show it fails consistently on every card based on those chips? A CPU/CHIP is very easy to replicate if they are ALL bad (Pentium FPU bug for example).

I mean really, the story came from Inquirer "moles"... Hardly the bastion of reliable information now is it?..

And the actual HP link on the said article (presented as "proof" no less - which made me LOL) is nothing to do with the GPU chip overheating.. its the Mainboard (which granted is nVidia based, but its not the GPU like they are making it out to be) that is overheating due to a bad BIOS profile being put into the notebook originally, if you don't have the issues (which I might add are Wi-Fi loss, total Power failiure and other things - Nothing GPU related except maybe the display issue) and flash to the new BIOS you dont get the issue. HP are replacing the motherboards on affected notebooks. It affects more than just the GPU it affects many things over the mainboard. My wife has one and her Wi-Fi card stopped working... due to overheating caused by a bad BIOS.. once its burned you cant get it back, but HP will swap the Mobo free of charge. It took less than a week for them to repair it and have it back at my house..

Granted I doubt I'll get a nvidia motherboard in a laptop again (I wont in a desktop either for that matter due to NF4 issues with Vista and nVidia's slowness to correct them and even acknowledge that they existed - But that's another story), but to run a story that ALL gpu's are bad with only conspiracy theories as proof, thats just borderline madness..

Its just typical Inquirer, We'll pull a hardware vendor out of the hat and find some minor crap and blow it out of proportion for great Justice and story telling malarky... I read the article, and they are just pulling straws because some "mole" told them some dirt.... They have no proof whatsoever that its the GPU causing any failures.. None... Zip... Nada...

Telling readers to go to the forums to check is stupid too.. Goto Asus's, Abit, DFI's, hell even ATI Forums.. there you will find hundreds and hundreds of users with problems with their boards. Perhaps they should run smear stories on them too, seeing that their products are obviously ALL defective too..??

Besides its currently cool to Diss Nvidia atm it seems.

If you are taking the Inquirer's as the reliable source then I'm sure you think the Daily Star or the National Enquirer are papers filled with facts that are totally true on a daily basis. Hell even The Onion is more truthful than the Inquirer to be quite honest... I'm amazed that some of you take it as gospel.

Once I see a statement from the OEM's supposedly affected by the so-called "GPU" Problem (Funny how it could be a Motherboard issue just like HP claim it is already) or I see some factual write up on it from Ars, or Anannd, or another more reputable site that knows what they are doing, then I'll believe it.. as it is I will take it with a pinch of salt personally. Remember they were SO RIGHT the DirectX10 for Windows XP story too..

Re:Typical Inquirer

[Whuffo]

Let's not blame HP for selling known defective notebooks, right? I mean, I've got one. The thing always ran hot and had problems with the wi-fi dropping out at odd times. But now it's dead; won't even power up.

So I contacted HP support about it. HP was so nice to extend the warranty on these turkeys and I thought it would be nice if they'd take care of THEIR problem. What actually happened was that their "support" agent hung up on me. Twice. I've escalated the issue with HP and nothing has happened. I've still got a dead laptop and they've got my money.

I'm typing this post on a nice new Sony laptop. I'll never, NEVER ever buy anything from HP. Maybe some day they'll fix that dead HP laptop and I'll Ebay it. Or maybe I'll end up tossing it in the trash. But no matter what they do at this point there's nothing that could ever convince me to buy from them again.

What really smells about this whole deal is that Nvidia contacted HP about the problem. HP knew about it, knew that they had a batch of defective laptops. What did they do with this knowledge? Right, they concealed it and sold the laptops to the public. Now they're refusing to repair them - they've made pleasant press releases but if you have one of the defective items you'll find that what their press releases say and what they'll actually do are quite different.

HP are you listening? If so, be aware you've lost a customer for life - and as many other potential customers as I can warn about you. And the HP apologists posting here are pathetic. How can you defend a company which knowingly sells defective product? How can you defend a company which says "we'll take care of it" in public, but actually refuses to honor their warranty on these defective items?

The questions that should be asked are what should Nvidia and the vendors that installed their defective chips be doing to correct this issue. If you look into it carefully, you'll find that they're issuing "we'll fix it" press releases and actually doing NOTHING for the victims of their "business practices". If you believe that they are then I'll make you a great deal on a nice HP laptop that just needs some of that promised warranty service.

Re:Typical Inquirer

[Cythrawl]

Lets not get away from the issue here.. The article states that ALL the GPUS are bad, and that their "proof" is the HP Link. The HP problem has NOTHING to do with the GPU's AT ALL. Its the motherboards.. Lets face it they are crap, and yes I totally agree with you that I will probably not buy a HP laptop ever again, but that's not the point I was trying to make.

The point is that they are grasping at straws and literally state that ALL the GPUS are bad. Its quite clear that they aren't, and that they have ZERO PROOF that they are other than an "Inquirer Mole".

People have bad experiences with all MFG's across the board with a huge amount of products, and like I said - Why dont they (the Inquirer) run some smear stories about Abit's Motherboards, Asus's GFX cards, Creative's Sound cards etc... Plenty of people have problems with those too... so they must be ALL bad.. Not a working one in them... ever..... right?

Six Sigma?

[Anonymous Coward]

j/k

Looks like

[g0bshiTe]

I'll be keeping my tired old 7600 GT for awhile.

Re:Looks like

[Lonewolf666]

That's still a decent midrange card. No reason to rush out and get another...

Re:Looks like

[g0bshiTe]

I know, I've used it more than 8 months now. It would be nice to have all the eye candy in COD4, but I'm still pegging decent frames with this card, using it at medium settings on 800 x 600.

Not Nvidia's First Recent Failure

[Nom du Keyboard]

This is hardly Nvidia's only recent failure. Vista drivers come to mind. In fact, Nvida's failure to deliver on a key DirectX 10 memory feature (ATI had it running fine on lower performing cards at the time) caused MS to downgrade DirectX 10 such that you don't even need Vista to support it any longer.

And let's not even discuss tessellation in DirectX 10.1 (again ATI has theirs working) and how Crysis downgraded their game back to DX10 after the ATI cards started stomping Nvidia in that hugely difficult to render game with DX 10.1. Were there some payoffs somewhere along the way here?

Nvidia has also missed the boat short-term by betting against GDDR5 in the current timeframe.

A lot of Nvidia shortcomings have been overlooked lately. Hope you weren't any of the people to pay $649 for the first 280GTX cards.

Re:Not Nvidia's First Recent Failure

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're referring to the Assassin's Creed DirectX 10.1 controversy in which a software maker reverted from DX10.1 to DX10 when ATI video cards were found to render the game faster.

Actually...

[EgoWumpus]

Rethink that from a more basic perspective. Are you saying that if you have 10,000 cards, you have an 80% chance of none of them failing?

It is not, actually an independent event. If you are rolling dice, and are looking for a given number, as the number of rolls increases so does the probability of your number occurring in the set of results. Naturally this changes once you roll - but that's not what we're talking about.

Easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always stuck with ATI, even when nVidia is current benchmark champ. I've always found their cards to be rock-solid reliable. Hell the fan on the X800 in the rig I type on now was completely stopped for god knows how long before I noticed, but it's all good up in the hood.

Whether the quality will decline now that AMD's at the wheel, I cannot say.

Hopefully Intel gets into the GPU market in a real way, and soon. Say what you will, Intel parts are nearly always the gold standard of reliability at the consumer level.

Re:A Grain of Salt-OR NOT

[Nom du Keyboard]

I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.

Given the BIOS updates by HP and Dell that turn on the fan continuously on the subject notebooks, the reports of higher recalls of these models, Nvidia setting aside $191M in reserve to "deal with this issue", and Dell at least extending their notebook warranties on these notebooks specifically for an additional year, that's a lot of smoke with no fire underneath it somewhere.

Re:your signature

[gad_zuki!]

Agreed, hardcore christians love that "joke" and Ive never really seen it represented without that context.

Re:Actually, not that big of a deal.Contamination?

[davidsyes]

Could it be some disgruntled employee pissing *just enough* in the mixing vat? Parts get made, marginally pass inspection, then reluctantly are shipped, only to fail due to additional environmentally-related matters? (Just an idea.... once when I was a messing assistant, i watched to my horror a disgruntled sailor remove his shoe, skim it along a pot of soup, and grudgingly and slowly say, "F-U-C-K-I-N-G OFFICERS"...)

Re:not that big of a deal?!?

[Lukiano]

Why so serious?

Mod -5 for making shit up

[Bryansix]

This guy still hasn't posted sources and is making radical claims about salmonella infection rates. If this rate was true then most of the US would have had some level of Salmonella poisoning by now. That is unless it is all killed by cooking it correctly. Still this post above is NOT informative. It is inflammatory. Don't confuse the two.

The Inquirer? Really?

[iceph03nix]

and here I was beginning to think /. had some standards

A wolf! A wolf!

[ozbird]

Charlie at The Inquirer has no credibility when it comes to nVidia.

From TFA, nVidia is changing from high lead to eutectic (tin) solder - for RoHS compliance - and has issues a PCN to that effect. Charlie has latched onto this as "proof" of his claim that all nVidia chips are faulty and overheat.

What Charlie doesn't explain is how switching from high-lead solder (5/95 Sn/Pb) to eutectic solder (63/37 Sn/Pb) - which has the lowest melting point of all tin-lead solders - is supposed to help if the chips are overheating. Nor does he explain how changing the solder material has any relationship to changing the underfill material on some mobile chips (other than they were both PCNs.) But hey, why let facts get in the way of a conspiracy theory/page hits?

Re:your signature

[darkvizier]

"...of his pity of man, God has died."

And if Nietzsche were still alive, he'd be laughing his ass off at all the people misquoting him, and thereby proving his point. Again. And again.

It's like retards running into walls.

Re: your brains

[CautionaryX]

Double negative -- let me fix it: "We're unreasonable here, everybody's going to eat your eyes."

I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip the waitress.

8700M... uh... computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow nice job on those 8700M... wait... they must be bad too but since they are sold by Dell they are "blessed" right?

Yeah right, I get all sorts of FPS issues on that card and SLI barely does anything. Time for an ATI.

90 nm parts are fine I think!

[AHTuttle]

I have 8800GTS 320MB SLIs. Like your 8600GT I think they are 90nm parts and hopefully are not affected. Other than acting like an effective space heater and sounding like industrial equipment my windows box with those 8800GTSs runs like a champ. It's actually an amazingly stable machine (yes even running windows (XP)) and spews out pixel very effectively. I run full 2560x1600 on many games with few hiccups. I never thought I'd be glad to have older graphics card(s)! But I do look forward to the day I can replace those beasts with one cool running card. I'll be waiting a while for a reliable one it seems.

Oh great...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great. I got two 8800GT OC in SLI... What are the chances that they are both good?

Socket GPU?

[phorm]

I wonder if we'll ever see graphics card makers use socket GPU's (or maybe it's been done before).

Could be a useful thing if they start coming out with multi-GPU cards... if you can't afford a dual-GPU then add it in later.

Re:Socket GPU?

[mrchaotica]

Personally, I'd like to see GPUs socketed in the motherboard in the same way floating point coprocessors used to be. I think AMD/ATI would be well-positioned to do this, considering that they have both good GPU technology and good bus technology (HyperTransport).

Re:Socket GPU?

[mikael]

Texas Instruments did that with their TMS34010's and TMS34020's in the 1990's. You could add as much VRAM as you liked (up to 8 Megabytes - which was 12 times as much memory was on the Intel CPU side). Some companies even added network card chips onto the graphics card, so the software network driver wouldn't slow down image viewing.

Re:Socket GPU?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe... hehe.. he said socketed in the mother

Re:Socket GPU?

[hairyfeet]

Well,I can tell you back in the day(Why yes,I am old) we could get graphic accelerator cards with slots to add in RAM because RAM was so expensive back then. I still have some old Matrox cards with the slot for a second 2Mb RAM chip. The things had these huge chips for such little amounts of RAM. So if they could do it back in the day with RAM,I don't see why they couldn't socket GPUs now. Personally I'd love it if I could upgrade my BFG 7600 OC AGP to a 7900 simply by swapping a chip.

Oh,and as for why I would hang onto ancient cards like that? You never know when they'll come in handy. In fact I am down 1 Matrox 4Mb card as I put it into a 900MHz office pull that the AGP slot had died on. The customer that is going to pick it up next week is quite happy with it,as he simply needed a cheap machine to check his email and do his books on. So it just goes to prove you never know when some old piece of junk will come in handy. As for Nvidia,I really hope they can turn this around. I have always had good luck with Nvidia cards,and unlike the ATI cards I never had trouble with the drivers. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Socket GPU?

[alienw]

Um, video memory back in those days was incredibly slow. That's why you could have multiple connectors and things in the way and it would still work. There is no way you could socket a modern chip and expect it to not affect signal integrity. Not to mention, sockets with a thousand pins are not particularly cheap, and GPUs are not exactly interchangeable. So this idea is quite silly.

Re:Socket GPU?

[hairyfeet]

What would you need a socket with a thousand pins for? You could put the chip already mounted in a mini socket and then have it plug straight into the board using a few really fast pipes like hypertransport. I personally think we are going to be seeing more of the "hybrid crossfire" style setups,where you can mix and match the GPUs and have it controlled by either a chip or software like RAID. It will simply run a benchmark and then allocate the jobs based on each GPUs strengths/weaknesses. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Socket GPU?

[Calinous]

As a side note, I've seen some GPU's with 512kB of RAM, and slots for another 512kB (two chips soldered and two sockets). The newest thing I've seen (still have it) is a Matrox G200 AGP card with 8MB of VRAM and a SODIMM-like connector for added memory.
      Won't happen again, as it's not in the best interest of card manufacturers, and there are performance penalties and some difficulties.

Re:Socket GPU?

[thealsir]

Well, until serial memory goes mainstream, there's no way you'll get the bandwidth that you're getting now with massively wide memory buses. And those buses require lots and LOTS of pins.

So it's just too expensive. Then there's the issue of some GPUs being much more complex than others, having different bus widths, different controllers, etc...I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it wouldn't be economical and the signal integrity would be slightly less, artificially lowering top speed.

There was one card that had two MXM connectors on it, and you could plug one or two mobile GPUs into it. MSI made it, I think. AFAIK it never shipped.

Re:Socket GPU?

[KhipuX]

I've still got a 256k Hercules card (the original Hercules that is) with space for another 256k on there and the bloody upgrade chips are more expensive these days than a whole new PCI-E card. Still, for the aging Amstrad 1640 (plastic is still grey too) it's a wonder on my A4 page white Taxan monitor. Believe it or not I still use Pagemaker and Wordperfect 5.1 on this thing (and it's faster than OpenOffice on a 4gig Core Quad I'm afraid). The thing is if your Nvidia card is DOA then send it back. If it packs up within a year..... send it back to the seller. This is what warranties are for.

Re:Socket GPU?

[phorm]

I remember the cards that you could add in V-RAM (I'm scared to check, but there might be one buried in a closet around here somewhere), but not any that you could add a socket GPU.

I don't see any reason why not though, except that perhaps the bandwidth requirements may generally require a secondary PCI slot as well so it's easier to just use an additional card?

Re:Socket GPU?

[hairyfeet]

That is why I always buy BFG and their lifetime warranty. It is not a rare occurrence for me to leave a machine at 100% for a day while I am doing a large video re-encode. I have never had any trouble with any of my BFG cards overheating,which surprised me as they come OC'd from the factory. And my 7600 512Mb AGP plays FEAR really nice. ;-)

Yeah, and we'll also pay a lot more...

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Contrary to your belief that 'these kinds of problems are subtle and might be missed during a decent period of testing' it can be EXTREMELY difficult to find these kinds of problems. Beyond your wildest imaginings difficult.

Having worked on high performance hardware/software systems as an engineer I can tell you from first hand experience that the situation is more like there are 999,999,998 ways for things to go wrong and about 2 ways you can get it right, and those 2 ways are not AT ALL obvious. Usually the types of problems you encounter HAVE no obvious cause and no obvious solution and mostly can't be reliably replicated. They can stem from the very most subtle differences between two boards or systems. A cap that happens to be a bit out of spec and a slightly less than perfect solder joint can combine to create an error that happens 1 out of every 100 billion times an operation is performed.

Now, combine that with the fact that you have a dozen vendors slightly varying implementations of a given board design, PCs of all different types and quality levels running at different speeds with different CPUs in them, running a plethora of different versions and subversions of OS and drivers and applications, and the real miracle is you can make a board that works reliably at all.

Any attempt to make a really seriously bullet proof product that would virtually never have problems is simply infeasible. There is a law of diminishing returns involved. At a certain point you have to say "Well, we've tested it in 10 dozen different systems under 6 different OS versions with 128 different apps, and we get N number of crashes/malfunctions per hour of runtime." and then you call it a day. You could spend 10x more time and money on QA and reduce the failures to N/2, but you also won't sell much product when multiply your NRE by a factor of 10...

Plus such perfection will be for naught because MS will release BrokenOS patch "friday the 13th" 2 days later and you'll STILL be encountering the higher error rates. Same goes for new motherboards, games, etc. It is just a loosing proposition.

All you can realistically do is what they do now, test the heck out of it as best you can afford to, ship it out the door, and try to address any issues that come up later as quickly and painlessly as you can.

This is the kind of reason why military and aerospace grade hardware costs 2000x more than electronics with similar functionality with civilian retail/commercial specs. They REALLY do have to be certain things work exactly right or people die, and it is WAY expensive.

Re:A wolf! A wolf!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have no credibility when it comes to nVidia. I don't see a single mention of RoHS in the article. I'd also point out that eutectic solder is not RoHS complaint. RoHS complant solder is less then 0.1% lead (Outside of medical devices and monitoring equipment). Eutectic solder is 37% Lead. It seems to me you're just making stuff up.

Re:A Grain of Salt-OR NOT

[Colonel Korn]

I'd suggest you not take any article written by Charlie seriously until it's been confirmed (not just repeated, as often happens) elsewhere.

Given the BIOS updates by HP and Dell that turn on the fan continuously on the subject notebooks, the reports of higher recalls of these models, Nvidia setting aside $191M in reserve to "deal with this issue", and Dell at least extending their notebook warranties on these notebooks specifically for an additional year, that's a lot of smoke with no fire underneath it somewhere.

The part of this article unrelated to the widely known evidence you cite, and the part that I will take a wait-and-see approach to, is the claim that every single nV 65 nm and 55 nm GPU is defective. On the other hand, net chatter makes them sound very stable, and there are far fewer complaints of broken 8800GTs than there are of 4870s (one of which I own, and mine is fine). I'm guessing that he's making a big overstatement with his claim that every single 55 or 65 nm nV GPU is defective.

My 8600GT runs fine...

[Doug52392]

I bought a nVidia 8600GT in December 2007 - no issues here... it hasn't failed and I haven't seen one graphics related BSoD on Vista (seen several BSoDs due to other things, like a corrupted registry, but never anything relating to the graphics). Does the failure suddenly appear, or is there any kind of early warning signs?

It must be true...

[Anonymous Coward]

Multiple stories directly attacking consumer confidence and affecting purchasing decisions for your product?

If this story weren't true, nVidia would have sued The Inq right off the face of the Earth by now.

Incorrect

[tknd]

In this example, the chance of one card failing is 20%. But we are not interested in just one card. We have two cards, therefore there are four possibilities: the first card fails, the second card fails, neither fail, or both fail. If we are interested in at least 1 card failing and the only condition that doesn't include at least one card failing is "neither fails" then we can use the property 1 - P[neither fails] to make the calculation simpler. If neither card can fail, then the probability of neither failing is 0.8 * 0.8 = 0.64 and of course 1 - 0.64 = 0.36.

If you want to go the harder way you would need to calculate the P[1st card failing but not 2nd] + P[2nd card failing but not 1st] + P[both cards failing] = P[at least one card failing]. That calculation would be: (0.2 * 0.8) + (0.8 * 0.2) + (0.2 * 0.2) = 0.36.

If that doesn't make sense then let's take a step back and say we have two coins and each coin is equally weighted so the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is exactly 1/2. If we flip one coin the probability of at least one coin being heads is therefore 1/2. If we flip two coins, the probability of at least one coin turning heads isn't that simple. There are again four possibilities: the first coin can be heads, the second coin can be heads, neither is heads, or both are heads. Therefore if each is equally likely then the probability of the first coin being heads but not the second is 1/4, the probability of the second coin being heads but not the first is 1/4, and finally the probability of both being heads is 1/4. So the probability of at least one coin being heads is 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 = 3/4.

Still doesn't make sense? Draw it out on a chart:

coin 1 heads | coin 2 heads | probability of outcome
No  1/2        No  1/2        1/4
Yes 1/2        No  1/2        1/4
No  1/2        Yes 1/2        1/4
Yes 1/2        Yes 1/2        1/4

If that's better for you, then the chart for the graphics cards would be:

1st card fails | 2nd card fails | probability of outcome
No  0.8          No  0.8          0.64
Yes 0.2          No  0.8          0.16
No  0.8          Yes 0.2          0.16
Yes 0.2          Yes 0.2          0.04

top banana - fdiv

[Sebastopol]

nVidia needs to take a page from Intel's FDIV days (ca. 1993) and just do a no-questions-asked recall and replace.

Glad I bought a 8600GTS on clearance

[Anonymous Coward]

.. when gamers were upgrading to the 8800GTS. They upgrade their systems more often than other people and are not likely to file a class action lawsuit since they'll just upgrade to the next latest and greatest soon anyway. There's always a risk to living on the bleeding edge.

Re: your brains

[argent]

I know you're just being a stupid twat, but you don't have to be an illiterate stupid twat.

The double negative is in "not unreasonable".

Eliminating that gets you "We're reasonable here, nobody's going to eat your eyes".

BTW, YFTSTR.

HTH, HAND.

Re:A wolf! A wolf!

[Jay L]

Good.. I thought it was just me. And I'm definitely NOT a hardware guy. But I can't see, from his description of the PCN, how switching from high-lead to tin solder could be seen as a response to, well, anything except "let's use less lead".

I know that 63/37 has a lower melting point than 60/40, and a "sharper" one (no pasty phase), which is why I use it for audio repairs and cabling; I'm a klutz, and anything that makes my solder joints more stable is good. But I can't imagine that this matters as much on SMT, where your components are fixed in place.

That said... a quick Google shows that there are all sorts of considerations in what solder to use for PCB solder bumps: not just temperature, but the metals involved in the leads, and the PCB traces, and a bunch of other stuff that involves knowing more about electronics and metallurgy than my "the batteries go this way" brain can handle. So there may well be some stability advantages to eutectic solder for NVidia's solder bumps.

Anyone here actually know this stuff? I've got an 8800GT in my Mac Pro, which definitely runs hotter than your average PC...

My experience with Nvidia Mobile Parts

[rahvin112]

I own two notebooks with Nvidia Chipsets in them. Both HP notebooks, one contains an 8400M the other an 8800m GTS. The 8400M notebook's cover broke at the hinge conection (a problem that was in no way related to circuit boards) last week and was sent back, just got it back today and checked on the repair slip was a note that they replaced the outside cover but they had also replaced the video circuit board. Surprise!

Just last week the Laptop with the 8800GTS started blue screening windows with a video subsystem problem before the login prompt. Ubuntu booted without error but would freeze every 30 seconds for 15 seconds or so if you moved the cursor on the screen. HP concluded the graphics system was malfunctioning and off to repair it went. I'll know in a couple weeks what was replaced but I bet the 8800GTS gets replaced.

This is a BIG deal people. Charlie is being a sensationalist but it's a BIG deal if HP extends the warranty on every laptop with the chips in them for an additional year. HP wouldn't do that unless they feared loss of customers or a class action lawsuit because the warranty extension costs them serious dollars. And I would also bet HP isn't going to eat every dollar. Nvidia will share the cost at a minimum. Even 10% bad parts could cost Nvidia hundreds of millions.

Charlie might go overboard in his complaints about Nvidia but he's right about this issue, it's really really big and Nvidia will eventually talk about it because of stories like this. Without Charlie's stories Nvidia would probably try to bury the issue and pretend it wasn't happening and if I was invested in NVDA I would want to know this information because it's a harbinger of a profit warning by NVDA.

Re: your brains

[BronsCon]

Woooooooooooosh!

Some stats

[repvik]

The CDC says 1.4 million americans are infected every year.
Deaths caused by salmonella in persons per million:

US: 0.0946797, which places #39
Norway is at 0.217723, #33
Luxemburg has more than 4 ppm (!) and gets first place ;)
Denmark 1.4
Germany 0.8
Oh, and South Africa has 0.090. Slightly less than the US.

So it would seem that salmonella is more prevalent in Europe than in the US.
Stats from CDC/NationMaster

Purchased 9800GTX+ (55nm)

[ari wins]

Purchased an eVGA 9800GTX+ from newegg few weeks back, and I have to say I'm anything but dissapointed. The card works fantastic, without overclocking, out of the box. I've never had it run more than 7 degrees warmer than it runs when windows loads, and even then the fan only kicked up to 75%, and the cooling took about a minute once I exited.

All in all, from my personal experience, the card is fantastic, and I'm not going to be concerned with this guy's fear-mongering. I was so pleased, in fact, that I turned around and bought a 22" widescreen just so I could get a higher resolution.

Yeah, looks like I'm screwed

[Quattro Vezina]

I've had an 8500GT (G86) since December. I'm now counting down the days until it goes kablooey. Yay.

Re: your brains

[Anonymous Coward]

Me !pass (english || boolean logic)? That !unpossible.

I wish my 9600GT would die ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a PNY 9600GT. I basically can't play Unreal Tournament 2004 because I get the black screen of death every 5 minutes or so. PNY said they wouldn't do anything for me because I haven't seen the crashes in UT3.

Re:I wish my 9600GT would die ...

[thealsir]

You sure you can't just send it in and they'll see latent problems there? You could also 'make' it permanently broken and send it in....

Yeah, but over how long?

[Harik]

I'd just like to take a moment to point out that citing a "x%" failure rate is a meaningless number.

Everything everywhere has a 100% failure rate - over a long enough timespan. At the opposite end, you've got the DoA rate, which is generally really low. So, over what time span are they claiming a 10-20% failure rate for nV chips? 1 month? 1 year? "lifetime" ( = product lifecycle)

Re:A wolf! A wolf!

[ozbird]

I stand corrected. If not RoHS compliant, eutectic solder is a step towards adopting lead-free solder - and as stated, nothing to do with the alleged overheating problems.

Better Article

[rcolquhoun]

There is a better article here:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39045/135/

Re inquirer articles - just cause the messenger wants them dead doesnt mean their message is incorrect.

The real problem is only going to show once the laptops are out of warranty as the customer will then have a choice of discarding the laptop or usually around $500 for a new motherboard. I imagine people will be quite angry.

RTFA, and then RTFComments

[capnkr]

TFA and /. summary are possibly grossly unfair. There *are* two sides to every story, and apparently the article author has a chip on his shoulder for Nvidia, no pun intended. (Personally, I don't have a dog in this fight, but in the interest of fairness...) Check out the comments, like this one which would seem to be from someone at Nvidia:

Answer this... As you know Charlie has a history of severe bias against NVIDIA. Our July announcement of the problem with notebook GPU failures (link) has given him lots to rant about. This new story is the latest in a series of articles in which he continues to stretch the truth in order to spread FUD. In it he asserts he paints the notebook chip failures as if it were a widespread epidemic affecting every single NVIDIA GPU in existence including desktop. Here is a list of BS and the truth.

Myth 1 - NVIDIA has denied responsibility for the failures and is blaming suppliers and partners.
In our announcements accept responsibility for the failures. We DO call out the material failure but we also acknowledge that our suppliers and notebook designs because this is true and we need to disclose this in our official statements to the SEC. We would not go on record with the SEC making such bold claims if they weren't true. See our Form 8-K statement below.

Myth 2 - There is an "official story" that the problems were limited a batch of a few bad parts for HP.
We have never issued a stated this. See our public statements below.

Where is source for that?

Myth 3 - NVIDIA is forcing a fix on notebook makers

The idea that a supplier like NVIDIA can dictate a fix to the world's largest PC makers is preposterous.

The truth is the notebook makers determining their own course of action and we are supporting them.

Where is source for that?

Myth 4 - NVIDIA is trying to cuts our financial liability.
We put aside $200M to help partners solve this problem for consumers. As far as we know NVIDIA is the first and only chip maker to help fund the cost for repairs.

Myth 5 - This affects desktop chips, G92, G94, etc.
We have only seen this problem on notebooks. We just reiterated this during an official financial call. Once again we would not say this if it wasn't true. Note we have not disclosed the specific GPUs but we have stated this impact previous generation GPUs and that current gen GPUs are not in production.

Fact Charlie has an obvious bias against NVIDIA and he has no sources to back up his claims. Out of all of the hundreds upon hundreds of notebooks models designed with NVIDIA chips in the last few years, only a small number of these have experienced the problem. Within this small number of models, only a small percentage actually experiences the chip failure. It is highly unlike a notebook user will experience the problem. And we have never seen this problem on desktop.

Other Useful Information

"Separately, NVIDIA plans to take a one-time charge from $150 million to $200 million against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems. Certain notebook configurations with GPUs and MCPs manufactured with a certain die/packaging material set are failing in the field at higher than normal rates. To date, abnormal failure rates with systems other than certain notebook systems have not been seen. NVIDIA has initiated discussions with its supply chain regarding this material set issue and the Company will also seek to access insurance coverage for this matter."
posted by : Derek, 29 August 2008

So, whichever way it breaks, I do hope that what *is* the truth WRT this issue gets out...

personal sample

[cenc]

Considering the limited number of cards I will own in my life (say no more than a 100), I have had 1.5 fail on me this month from NVIDIA, and I have never had any video card fail on me in my life.

Re: your brains

[davolfman]

We're at an impasse here, maybe we can compromise.

No problems here

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh... I have been running my 8800GTS G92 for the last 8 months, cycling every day (sometimes multiple times per day... I try to save power whenever possible) and I've had zero issues...

The card goes from 70C (at peak) down to 15C at night and back up in the morning. (My computer room has an open window and has gone through Winter, Spring, Summer and now into Fall)

So far no issues... besides, it has a lifetime warranty and I'll be buying a replacement mid '09 ANYWAY.

hmm.. problem...

[SuperDre]

How do we know for sure this report is correct, and not an attempt to try to bankrupt Nvidia by some 3rd party.. All we have to go on is hearsay and no real facts. That's the problem with internet, a lot of people actually believe everything that is posted on it, which ofcourse a lot of times is just wrong information..

Perhaps it's time to get that reliability back...

[sethstorm]

Or just do the right thing by making it expensive to not have it anything but military/aerospace quality.

That's silly

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Which do you want? A $3000 perfectly reliable video card or a $150 video card that is 99% reliable? You probably don't have $3000 to spend on a video card. I know I don't. If you do, then chances are you can get what you want, but also be prepared for it to be 5 years out of date, because no amount of NRE will make such a product come out of the pipeline fast.

Beyond that it is really a false choice, because the hypothetical $3000 card will only BE 100% reliable if you also buy only the motherboard, power supply, etc that it can be guaranteed to BE 100% reliable with, and only run the OS and apps it is guaranteed to work reliably with. Even then nothing is 100% reliable. Eventually your perfect card will drift out of spec just a bit and 1 time out of a billion some edge of some signal won't hit the bus inside some timing window in some obscure condition and you'll have a crash.

I helped design, test, and verify avionics systems on practically all major commercial airliners put in service in the '90s. The systems we designed and built are safety of flight critical systems. Those systems are designed, verified, built, and tested to literally the highest standards known to engineering, every bit as stringent as anything you'd find inside a nuclear reactor. Yet STILL we occasionally ran into scenarios with equipment in use in the field where the function of the system was compromised by failure scenarios which simply could not be fully anticipated. The cost of those systems was enormous. No retail grade product could ever conceivably achieve even that level of reliability and still be worth the cost.

So really, what you're effectively saying is 'if we can't have a perfect video card, we should have none at all'.

Re:A wolf! A wolf!

[makomk]

The general reckoning seems to be that the issue is thermal expansion rates, not melting point - see, for example this article which someone linked elsewhere in the thread.

Fine, but they're a lot further away as time goes.

[sethstorm]

After seeing a decent size of hardware go my way, I'm not sure 99% is even reachable. For $500-700, that card had better last 2-3 years and still be at least a middle-of-the-road performer.

What we get now are mostly cards that are built towards (versus against) failure. It'd be time to take a page from Korea and make it too good to want to return(by making electronics returnable for about any reason). That is how quality can be turned around.

There is the occasional nod to hardware reliability, it is seen in companies that have largely gone under(SGI, pre-acquisition 3dfx, NCR before they went to clones, and DEC to name a few). Perhaps some would want to know that swapping out hardware does take time and money.

Skeptical

[HornWumpus]

I've been in the computer industry for 20 years.

ALL the best coders are mechanically inclined. It's the same part of the brain.

Probably the self described expert phenomenon yet again.

I knew a coding/database 'expert' that ran his car without oil despite the idiot light being on. In his defense he had checked the tranny fluid and even topped it up to 10W40.

I'd say the best we can do as consumers

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Is to not buy cutting edge hardware. Any time you go out and buy the latest super duper brand new shiny high performance stuff you're a lot more likely to get something unstable or potentially defective than if you go for the middle of the road stuff.

The high end stuff is always by its very nature pushing the hairy edge of the power, thermal, process, etc envelope. Thinking back I've purchased 5 video cards in the last 12 years or so. All of them worked flawlessly. For that matter I still own 4 of the 5 and 3 of them are still in service and working fine. None of them ever failed.

Seems to me I never had really serious driver issues either. Certainly the drivers always steadily improved to the point of being pretty near 100% reliable. The NVIDIA Quattro card I'm using now works great. I had maybe a half dozen crashes really early on. Nothing since then.

I think hardware manufacturers are certainly obliged to TRY their best to make a reliable product, but if people want to be able to play really demanding 3D games at high res then they're also going to have to be willing to deal with the fact that cards required to do that are going to be less stable. It is a tradeoff. Nobody forces people to buy a 9800 GTX, they could settle for a lower end card if they wanted better stability. That being said obviously it isn't either good business practice nor good ethics to sell a product which is useless or known to be seriously defective.

Sounds to me like NVIDIA ran into an engineering problem with certain products which I am guessing was pretty difficult to uncover before the fact, and now they're doing the right thing and backing those products. I guess it remains to be seen as to how well they do that.