Slashdot Mirror
NVidia Puts the Kibosh On Overclocking of GTX 900M Series
An anonymous reader writes Nvidia surprised members of the overclocking community this week when it pulled OC support from drivers for its 900M series mobile graphics cards. Many users (particularly those who bought laptops with higher-end cards like the 980m) were overclocking – until the latest driver update. Now, Nvidia is telling customers not to expect OC capabilities to return. “Unfortunately GeForce Notebooks were not designed to support overclocking,” wrote Nvidia’s Manuel Guzman. “Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects.”
If the user overclocks their GPU and it ends up overheating and breaking down isn't the responsibility for that on the user's shoulders? Why does NVidia care so much? Does the law somewhere state that NVidia is still responsible for the damages since their drivers have such an option or what is missing from this story? If some law somewhere did state that then I could totally understand NVidia's stance, but at the same time it would make me wonder why it doesn't apply to desktops, then.
Has any 3rd party overclocking tool circumvented this yet?
I can kinda understand where they are coming from here even though I hate features getting removed. It would not surprise me if they had some pressure put on them from manufacturers. I have a friend who has basically killed two laptops overclocking them, he then takes them back and demands they are faulty, I am sure he isn't the only one doing that. Most stores don't have the technical people to be able to identify the cause on the spot so they accept the swap, especially if it is in the first few weeks of purchase.
To my overclocked finger
-----------------
"fcuk Nvidia" -- Linus Torvalds
Really, you need to OC the GPU on a freaking cheesy laptop?
What, are your Flappy Birds flapping too slow?
I can see why they are removing the overclock feature on graphics hardware in very tight spaces with little in the way of cooling options so I really don't understand why this is a story.
Those notebooks were not meant to produce that performance, it may be capable, but: - NVidia does not want to deal with fried GPUs, to decide/prove if it was because of the overclocking or some manufacturing problems - Suffer the negative PR on the market if too many of their systems seem to die ahead of time or suffer from heat/related issues.. Apart from some rare exceptions notebooks were never meant to be in the same performance category as desktop configurations, this should be taken into consideration this when buying one.
This is all about warranty repairs.
Less than bright people overclock their laptops to unsafe levels, laptop dies after 6-12 months and ends up on the laptop manufacturer's repair table. No way to conclusively prove it was overclocked, so they end up picking the tab for the hardware abuse.
Laptop drivers have allowed overclocking for a good while, so it must be that some recent generation NV chip had unusually tight margins and there is a noticeable spike in warranty claims, or just some big laptop manufacturer not wanting to deal with the headaches of overclocking-related support/warranty incidents is suddenly pushing NV to solve he issue on the driver level or lose business.
High end GPUs have always had fairly tight thermal margins. Even more so on laptops. The age old problem of packing really high performance silicon into laptop form factor with tiny heatsinks and small fans. Sure, they could just downclock the chip by 20% and have a nice, cool laptop that... would lose to the competitor GPU and really mess up the sales of the chip. So they push it as far as they possibly can... and the tight margins on laptops just can't do any meaningful overclocking without completely replacing the cooling - which is not really doable in a laptop.
At least on NV side you generally can always install the "generic" laptop driver and get the latest driver bits. On AMD side there are many laptop manufacturers that outright block the generic AMD graphics drivers for ~reasons~ and you end up with a piece of hardware that has effectively an unsupported GPU - laptop manufacturer cannot be assed to update the GPU driver and generic drivers do not install (unless modded).
Coming from the people who brought you self-destructing laptop GPU chipsets and fan profiles that prefer quiet to reliable.
Does no-one remember the 8800M GT?
Damn fools used low melting point solder on them and they failed worse than Windows ME.
They never have and never will specify decent cooling.
Many a fine laptop has been turned into a brick by this short-sightedness.
But never mind, you can just go buy another!
NVidia are merely doing what Intel did with clock locking. And for the same reason: they don't want people getting a cheaper card and overclocking it, they want people to buy the most expensive card.
OC doesn't lead to catastrophic failure in the first year unless the system already has a fault that would appear in a few years of normal use. This is how they test MTBF: stress test and see failures, scale back to the rate of normal use to get the mean time before failure.
However, that means that without OCing, the system would last on average longer than the manufacturers' warranty,which they scale so that they don't have many failing during that time. Add in that most won't have the receipts more than a couple of months and their fear is that OCing would get some warranty returns within the period they have kept the receipts for.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They took away 3d anaglyph glasses support a while back.
That really pissed me off as I use that.
And YES I payed for my nvidia card.
They're like gnome3 / debian /systemd.
I would be cautious about over clocking any mobile platform that has limited abilities to add more cooling capabilities. I always wondered why these graphic card companies even allow OC when they could be trying to upsell their cards by locking down their cheaper options? I would not be surprised if the laptop makers were crying foul about this happening. Maybe they complained about seeing more failed units because of a suspicion of the user OC them?
The 980M in my Clevo P650SG overclocks by 125MHz with ease - and it won't even hit 70C while playing games in that overclocked state either. When you're playing at 3K (there's also a 4K screen available), that extra 125MHz makes a noticeable difference.
Removal of overclocking from the drivers is irritating at best.
asked warranty? If it can't handle the heat then it should never been in the laptop. This is a blantant brown-nose of OEMs and I am not going to take it anymore.
Yes but what about that cheap and nasty Acer or similar shit brand which is already pushing the limits of it's cooling instead of having a safety factor in the design. BBQ!
What about the people living where water outside is not in a solid state at the moment. BBQ!
Nvidia disabled oc because people were returning notebooks that did not over lock well.
I'm going to watch Idiocracy one more time; Maybe I can still laugh about it, before it hits too close to home.
That's just the thing. If you're a gamer and you have a bunch of bullshit games on your laptop they should just call you on your f****** bullshit; "it, it broke!"
I recently upgraded the wrong firmware on a $50 device, bricked it, and then called the mfctr and got a replacement. Do I feel guilty? Not really. I am mot a gamer at all, and fortunately I know better than to purposefully fry the gpu connector on a laptop, having had to get an NEC crt fixed for this exact reason. Not overclocking of course, just bad components/soldering. Got it fixed under warranty but it didn't last very long thereafter.
Point is, it's good laptops get eventually fried when overclocked and also good Mfctr's are now taking this into account. Win/Win.
I plan on a high-end motion tablet very soon. ~$4000. Overclocked laptops are for kiddies that need to be reminded of their bedtime.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You can't control the power supply or heat dissipation on a laptop. So yes, you'd be a complete idiot to overclock one. You'd almost have to not even know how overclocking works to even attempt it.
You are not entitled to run your hardware beyond the design specification. Period.
Suck it up and get over it.
I had a dell XPS15 model with a manufacturing defect that made the computer crash when running games, the only way to solve it was to underclock the GPU. No it was not overheating, it was a manufacturing problem, there are several accounts of this problem on the net.
The cheap and nasty Acer will throttle when it gets to 70C, overclocked or not.
The water outside here isn't frozen. I'm in the southeast of the UK, where we've had a generally mild, largely snowless winter - it's 8C as I write this, for example. Not that that matters, as most of us have central heating and the temperature indoors won't be anywhere near as cold as it is outside!
The 2nd-gen Maxwell chips are known to run cool and overclock well, be they laptop or desktop form (in fact, it's the same silicon - just with a few bits lopped off and a lower stock speed for mobile). A cynic would say they're removing overclocking as it'll impact on their plans to release slightly faster versions of the same chip later this year...
I am sure this is based on some analysis of failure data. Regardless, this is a bad move when people are already cooling off on discrete graphics, especially on laptops. Intel integrated graphics will now run many games adequately on small screens and there are obvious cost/form factor/battery life advantages. If you don't cater to hardcore gamer/technology enthusiast market that is most interested in overclocking, just who is going to buy your chips and cards?
People overclock their stuff and then tells it was faulty when it meltdown. Sure they can then check the board and find it was OC'ed to death (the board usually set a bit in an eprom to show it was OC'ed), but it cost money and ultimately it is much easier to remove the ability.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
A cynic would say they're removing overclocking as it'll impact on their plans to release slightly faster versions of the same chip later this year...
That would almost make sense if we were talking about desktops, where the user can replace the GPU. That's typically not an option in a laptop; even if the GPU is designed to be replaceable, it's oft not designed to be upgradeable, or the manufacturer doesn't make parts available. And I say almost because anyone who cares about having the fastest laptop GPU on the block enough that they overclock their laptop GPU will run out and buy one of the new models that has a GPU that comes from the factory running at the same cockspeed their current GPU is overclocked to, so they can overclock it further; bonus points if it's clocked faster from the factory. The people for whom this will be an issue are the very same people who'd be giving nVidia their money either way.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
FWIW, the sort of laptops for which this is an issue (ie high-end gaming laptops) typically have graphics cards on MXM modules, they're designed to be upgradeable to the latest and greatest.
The *price* of those modules, however, means it's not something most owners will ever do...
I believe I, at the very least, hinted at that when I said "or the manufacturer doesn't make parts available". If you think for a moment that HP et al aren't checking the hardware identifiers of MXM modules the same way they check hardware identifiers on wi-fi cards (I had an HP that refused to boot with a wi-fi card not on their "approved" list, instead halting before POST with an error about an unsupported card; I later learned that HP isn't the only one doing this), you're quite mistaken. That means, if you want a new graphics card, you have to get it through your laptop's manufacturer; if they don't make the parts available, well, that's that and good luck. Try eBay if all you need is to replace a bad one, but if you're looking to upgrade, well, sorry Jack.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Just wait for Carpel Tunnel to set in. It is like someone turned off the turbo on your computer/hand.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
From a technical standpoint, it seems like the ideal solution is to have some programmable ROM that users can blow to indicate that they have accepted any harm that comes from clocking it beyond what the design (heat/voltage/lifetime) allows. That ROM would have to be queryable via a tamper-proof BIOS or EFI hook so that stores could verify that it is intact before accepting returns.
Ultimately, user freedom to do what they want with their own hardware has to come with user responsibility over the consequences -- and for that to happen there has to be auditable tracing of what software was run. In other words, freedom to tinker comes with an obligation to be accountable.
Of course, from a marketing/deployment standpoint we can't do this. The monkey at Best Buy can barely work the register, let alone query some low-level EFI hook. And that's the common denominator we have to work with.
I can OC the fuck out of my Intel 945GM (from 166MHz to 400 MHz) and stil remain within the specified thermal envelope, IN MY LAPTOP.
Except that these are an "M" (for Mobile) series, not a card, but a chip. Also not something you buy individually, but rather what comes with the laptop, and makes the entire thing useless if it burns out.
For desktops, you can add cooling to support the OC, and if you do burn out the card it can be replaced. Few laptops support hardware upgrades or replacements for GPU.
Laptops using these high-end chips ("gaming laptops") are often unable to handle the thermal load. I don't know why the hell anyone would overclock one, but I sure as hell want to UNDERCLOCK them, so that I can use the discrete chip without setting my balls on fire.
It would be fine if they were simply removing OC support on new cards. The problem is that they are removing a feature from a product that has already been sold, and even used as an advertising point by some manufacturers. This is no different to Sony removing OtherOS from the PS3.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.