Lots of Nvidia Laptop Graphics Cards Are Overheating, Dying
Apparently some previous-gen Nvidia graphics cards that shipped in “significant quantities” of notebooks are defective, built and packaged with “weak” materials that are leading to them to overheat and fail at a “higher-than-normal” rate. Enough are bad that Nvidia is taking a US$150-US$200 million hit on its earnings for the quarter. Do you have one of these cards?
Nvidia doesn’t say which cards are affected, but it seems to be ones in the 8M series (which are now previous gen). The fix–a new driver that kicks in the cooling fans sooner, rather than later—is being distributed direct to notebook makers. So, if you’ve got a new Nvidia driver waiting for you from Dell or whoever made your laptop, congrats, you win! [WSJ, PC World]
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Sony will void your warranty because of this. They told me it was because there was some smoking residue inside of my computer, because of a year of smoking around it and my mother board was “corroded” because of it. Though my MB worked fine, it was my graphics card that stopped working. They want 699.99$ to fix my computer.
I brought a Hp pavillion Tx1305us, and last week i get a problem my wifi does not work, and after reserching i found out because of the high temperatures it melting the circuits. making the wireless cards not working, ive done many research. now i have a broken laptop that i didnt used much (10 months) i brought in St Maartenn ( caribean island ) and i live in Paramaribo- Suriname. im very upset, its my money wasted in a broken thing. here in suriname, theres no dealer in Suriname. and i wont pack my thing and do to St Maarten to change my laptop. i hope they starting making a recall for these affected products and find one way to resolve every ones problem.
While the story is somewhat useful it provides just enough info to worry some of us but not enough to prove useful. If anyone who has any real info regarding this issue knows any answers I would love to know the following: 1) does this impact all 8M series cards or only those sold to certain manufacturers or certain series of cards? 2) Are any Sony laptops impacted? 3) While it is nice that Dell has a BIOS fix, do any other companies, 4) are there any third party applications available to allow you to change default fan speed, such as Riva Tuner for ATI desktop cards? Thanks
Don’t have any real useful specifics on which GPUs are effected as NVIDIA / HP are keeping that pretty close to the chest. I do know that I have tried several times to get some sort of answers or assistance from HP “Total Care” support with no results. They seem to be covering some configurations but not others even though the symptoms displayed are identical and the machines both have the defective NVIDIA GPUs (in my case the GO 7600)
Just as an interesting side note here. I have had a couple of reports from clients that have had GPU temps in their notebooks that have exceeded 100 degrees Celcius. All it will take is one incident of a fire or personal injury being linked to this heating issue and this will take on a whole new meaning. Just ask the Maytag people about dishwasher recalls and rewiring on hundreds of thousands of machines that were deemed to be fire hazards and this included those that had been out of warrantee for years. In the mean time I would advise HP to but some sort of warning out to advise people to keep any sort of low temp combustibles out of harms way so to speak.
Perhaps a few letters to the various consumer protection agencies with regard to potential fire hazard might motivate HP to “do the right thing”