NVIDIA mobile woes not as bad as most people believe

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.

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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>

About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.

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Re: NVIDIA mobile woes not as bad as most people believe
by Anonymous on Tuesday, September 09 2008 @ 5:25 CEST

Nobody, not Nvidia, not Dell and not HP could AFFORD to recall the amount of notebooks with these chips.

They are just playing the field and figuring most will die outside of warranty terms. A couple of years from now and a lot of dead notebooks later there is going to be a lot of bad blood with the customer base.

Customers can't prove anything so all these companies are taking advantage of that, and abusing their customers. This is appalling. There should be a class action lawsuit to force warranty terms to be moved up to 5 years and "replacement new machine only" as the terms and you'd see a lot more concern from the makers then.

This is enough to make people never buy Dell, HP or Nvidia ever again in the notebook area out of sheer mistrust. Imagine if this were a car, where the transmission was going to go at some point but probably past the 60k warranty. Where is the consumer protection, or even the consumers best interest in all this?

Guess Dell and HP collected their checks so why should they care in the least about the customer. Tell them the noise in the transmission is just 'operator error' and offer to sell them another car?

This is a commercial outrage. I smell a large, very, very large class action lawsuit coming for these folks.

Re: NVIDIA mobile woes not as bad as most people believe
by Anonymous on Tuesday, September 09 2008 @ 5:33 CEST

Won't touch a notebook purchase for at least the next year. We'll make do with what we have and let this problem blow over.

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