Posted on Monday, September 08 2008 @ 22:35 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
FUD Zilla did some digging
and found out that the problems with NVIDIA's notebook chips are blown out of proportion, the site claims the situation is a lot better than most people believe.
We were told by industry sources that so far neither Dell or HP have recalled a single notebook using Nvidia GPUs. You might be aware that mostly notebooks with Geforce 7 and Geforce 8 mobile chips are affected, and so far there are no reports that Geforce 9 mobile series are having the same issue. The issue is related to a mobile chip packaging and obviously, someone used a wrong combination of materials that is leading to this issue.
...
We were also told that the issue affects a small number of notebooks and it occurs mostly in some notebooks where the GPU and the rest of the machine is pushed to its limits, and even then it doesn’t happen every time. There will be more about this issue as it really caught our attention.
The site also
says NVIDIA has made a deal with big OEMs, such as Dell and HP, to pay $200 per affected notebook:
Nvidia announced that it will set aside $200 million to deal with the latest notebook issue. The big news that is usually forgotten is that Nvidia GPUs are mostly having an issue with throttling and they actually don’t die, at least not in most of the cases.
Nvidia made a deal with big OEMs, such as Dell and HP, that they will get $200 per affected notebook and we are hearing that OEMs are quite happy about it. It turns out that this is more than generous and that this covers the cost of a new chip, the repair cost and all the other cost related to this issue.<:blockquote>