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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.
because quite often it takes a lot of effort to identify that the cause was user overclocking, by then the customer has complained to the store, many stores have policies of replacement or money back in first X days. While it definitely should be a try it at your own risk situation, the reality is people will basically lie to the retailers face saying they did nothing and expect a refund/replacement.
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.
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...
Hence, they are playing it safe.
Desktops have MUCH better cooling systems, and hence are much less likely to suffer from extreme temperature problems...
I suspect it is also a sign they are pushing the limits harder - remember, new generation GPUs have built in 'overclocking' in the form of dynamic clocks already,
so they are using up the headroom they had more effectively. This means you are more likely to be pushing past a limit, and less likely to notice (until too late).
They will always wear the fallout from such peoples actions.. so they have obviously decided right now the risk is not worth the reward.
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.
ROFLMAO at your Naivete.
People are copying our software!
That's piracy and they should be charged with such. A few cases of piracy going through and that shit will stop real fast.
People are driving drunk.
That's drunk driving and they should be charged with such. A few cases of drunk driving going through and that shit will stop real fast.
People are murdering other people!
That's murder and they should be charged with such. A few cases of murder going through and that shit will stop real fast.
Nowhere in the entire history of mankind has a few people being punished for a crime stopped others from committing the same crime.
But hey, you're an optimist so you've got that going for you. And that's nice.
Desktops have MUCH better cooling systems, and hence are much less likely to suffer from extreme temperature problems...
Very much true. I sysadmin about 40 high-end laptops; Dell Precision and a few HP Elitebook series. Over the past six year generation after generation, I would say at least 10 of those suffered a GPU failure at some point. Most occurred under the extended warranty, a few past. As for the HPs, one had its GPU die. I try to blow as much dust as possible when one crosses my path. Very easy to tell who has pets at home and who doesn't. Unfortunately, these users are geoscientists that run some serious programs and need to be mobile. Point being in all this, I've never seen a high-end nVidia Quadro card fail in a desktop machine, but plenty in laptops.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.'"
Punishment for a crime is just ritualistic sadism.
It takes the offender out of normal society and and puts them into a society full of criminals. It gives them a record to make it more difficult for them to integrate into normal society. it makes the best possible effort to ensure that they reoffend.
The only reason for locking someone away is if they are a danger to society. Since most people locked away in the US are not a danger to society, we have a nation of sadists. And, as the prison system is privatised, an industry of businesses profiting from sadism.
It does apply to desktops, but there are several significant differences... like: 1. Desktop users have control of over ways to manage heat that they can't with laptops 2. If a desktop user fries their graphics card, they only have to replace their graphics card. In comparison, integrated graphics cards are permanently attached to the motherboard which typically also has a BGA processor soldered on. That is three components needing to be swapped out if the user screws up the graphics card from using a feature that has no use case. 3. User built desktops typically used for over clocking don't have warranties
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Perhaps we should give them hugs and include them in our sing song circle?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.