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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.”
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.
Customer support always lie.
Customer support don't ever want to support the customer.
Customer support is not a technician.
Customer support has a script for non-technician and will insist on going through every bullet point.
Customer support is not there.
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Because NVidia got seriously hammered not that many years ago by 'Bumpgate' when their laptop GPUs were having serious reliability problems with their physical connection to the circuit boards, mainly caused by heat.,
While people like to claim of course they did nothing wrong, I am sure people who cook their laptops overclocking them will always try and point the finger back at NVidia...
The Quadro FX1500 and some other chips had a die bonding problem. nVidia failed and they knew it, and what's more, the downstream OEMs knew it. I had an HP Elitebook with FX1500 graphics, which died the death of a thousand dogs amen. It took me literally over 24 hours of phone time to get a replacement because fuck you, HP, that's a name for a sauce, not a computer company. But what really clinched the deal was that I found out during the course of the problem that this was actually a known problem, techs inside HP (the high-end ones, not just phone monkeys) actually knew of the problem. And this was a laptop with an MXM video card, so they could have replaced them. But since this is HP, they didn't do that. And no manufacturer will, which is why paying extra for your notebook's video card to have an MXM connector is a boondoggle. In theory, they can replace just the video card. In practice, that costs too much, they will just replace the whole machine if you can get them to admit that they made you a lemon.
So yes, nVidia just fucked up. No, I never OC'd my mobile Quadro. Yes, that's the part of the PC that died, before the HP "tech" came out and killed it the rest of the way (it would work until it heated up, before that) with static, days after I called. That's what your on-site three-year warranty from HP gets you. Fucked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The real problem with OCing and failure, is that when a failure does occur sometimes you can't tell it has occurred. Part of the chip just stops working that might not be critical to the system. It's near impossible to tell this has happened without a lot of analysis that the average person overclocking is simply not capable of. Just because it happens to "work" when you first do it does not mean you aren't causing irreparable damage.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.