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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.”
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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!
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.
And?
They supply chips to manufacturers and overclocking is specifically RUNNING SOMETHING PAST ITS DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS. As such, overclocking causing product returns is exactly the kind of things that suppliers will push back to nVidia on to cost them money.
How would you like it if you designed sold a laptop for which a component manufacturer allowed you to ramp it up to 120 degrees when your case was only designed, built and tested to withstand 90 degrees? Every return you get, you'd either push back to the user themselves (their own fault) or to the chip manufacturer for allowing their chips to run outside their own specs.
If you want to overclock, it's at your own risk and with ZERO support from the manufacturer (nVidia or anyone else). I say this as someone who once owned a couple of MSI laptops with a "TurboCharge" button placed next to the Wifi button that overclocked the CPU and GPU. It specifically said using it voids your warranty. I never used it. In fact, I uninstalled the hotkey software that would ever let you try to do so.
If a car manufacturer says their cars are not designed to run at over 100mph (almost every standard tyre you will buy) or over 7000rpm, that's where they stop caring. And they will - like car manufacturer's have - put in rev limiters to stop you damaging the engine by trying to go beyond that. If you choose to is at YOUR option, and your own risk and no manufacturer will condone or help you to do that.
Otherwise it wouldn't BE "over"clocking. It would just be "clocking"