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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.
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.
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).
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.
Perhaps we should give them hugs and include them in our sing song circle?
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