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Apple Admits Nvidia GPU Defect In Some MacBook Pros
bigwophh writes "The brouhaha over defective Nvidia mobile graphics chips keeps rolling along, even months after the initial headlines have faded. Despite Nvidia's promises that Apple's GeForce 8600M GT-based MacBook Pros had dodged the bullet and were immune from the defect, Apple now counters that it wasn't, in fact, so lucky. 'In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, Nvidia assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected.' The units in question are the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro notebooks with Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT GPUs, built between May 2007 and September 2008."
Yup, at least about the G84 and G86 chips being universally defective. There's a long thread on the Apple discussions forum full of people who experienced these failures. It got so long that people's browsers were timing out, so the moderators closed it and opened a follow-on thread.... Somebody on the thread put together a spreadsheet on Google Docs with almost three hundred affected machines.
The failure symptom is that the internal display dies completely and the external display fails over to the integrated chipset. A check of video hardware shows that the video chip is an Intel chip because the NVIDIA chip is no longer detected.
Assuming that only a small percentage of people who experienced this failure are listed on that spreadsheet, that represents a staggering number of component failures as a percentage of unit sales. Figure that Apple sold about 6 million notebooks (best guess) in that 1.5 years. I'd bet that only about 5% are MBP, which would be a total of 300k units (ballpark). That means that this one thread alone represents a failure rate of one unit out of every 1000 units sold. However, because most people don't even know about discussions.apple.com, much less seek out a particular thread and post in it, that estimate is probably way low....
What scares me is that there is no clear evidence that NVIDIA has fixed the problem. Thus, there is no reason to believe that the replacement chips won't fail after another year once they're outside the warranty extension period.
There's an easy way to diagnose this specific problem and prove it to the Apple techs. Boot the computer with sound on; you should hear Mac OSX start up. Hit Command-F5 (or Command-Fn-F5, depending on your settings.) That will turn on Voiceover. This will let you navigate without the screen, (although slowly and painfully). Go to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Screen Sharing, and turn on screen sharing, setting a password. Use TightVNC to connect to your MBP's IP address. You now have a screen. Go to About This Mac -> System Profiler. Check your graphics card. If it reports as an Intel GMA X3100, take a screenshot and print it. That's the rock-solid proof of a faulty GeForce 8600. Used this method to get mine replaced 2 days ago. I had Applecare, thank goodness; if you have one of these Macbooks and you've had it less than a year, GET APPLECARE. The chip WILL fail, and then you're out $1000 for a logic board replacement, as Apple has given no indication that they're going to extend the warranty for this issue.