For anyone with a Geforce 8 or 9 series card
Sept 12, 2008 10:17:24 GMT
Post by CharlieChomper on Sept 12, 2008 10:17:24 GMT
For the past few months, there has been an ongoing issue of failures of video/graphic card and chipsets which were originally thought to be limited to laptops and didn't discriminate as to who had problems (ie anyone involved in the manufacturing of laptops from Gateway to HP to Apple to Dell, etc. and specifically using a Geforce 8 or 9 series chipset), but has further been confirmed by nVidia (after long-held suspicions and questions as to the high rates of failures) as also affecting owners of actual cards from either of those series.
The source of the problem appears to be in the "packaging" of the chip (specifically, the GPU (graphical processing unit)/"core")/the makeup of it of where it isn't handling heat as well as it realistically should be or was designed to (in fact, it's running much hotter than it should be) and the overheating, in turn, is what's killing the hardware. The actual cause involved is that the thermal temperatures are not registering correcting on the cards/chips and that, therefore, is throwing off both the temperature reports as well as how soon/late the cooling mechanisms are going into affect=the overheating problem.
nVidia along with OEM manufacturers (companies such as Dell, Apple, Gateway, HP, etc.) are replacing the cards when this failure has been happening (provided the person with the card still has some sort of receipt to prove it in most cases--in the case of laptops, this has been a bit more complicated) and, in the meantime, nVidia had been working with the laptop manufacturers as well as a large number of motherboard companies to implement changes to the BIOS that would allow system fans and cooling to run sooner than they might normally to help try and compensate for the overheating situation for now.
According to nVidia (who, along with ATI/AMD and Intel are currently facing other problems right now of a serious nature), the problem appears to have stemmed from one of their suppliers providing fault materials. However, there hasn't been any confirmation as to whether or not the cards currently on the market or the computers (including just laptops) with those cards or chipsets within them which were sold beginning in August or this month are actually free of the problem or not (it's still too early to tell).
They are only replacing cards which have already failed because of this--not ones appear to still be working as they should, I should note.
Regardless, this has already led to their being sued over this and claims the company may have known of it as early as eight months prior to their initial announcement about it (when HP released a BIOS update for their laptops to supposedly help alleviate the overheating problem).
The source of the problem appears to be in the "packaging" of the chip (specifically, the GPU (graphical processing unit)/"core")/the makeup of it of where it isn't handling heat as well as it realistically should be or was designed to (in fact, it's running much hotter than it should be) and the overheating, in turn, is what's killing the hardware. The actual cause involved is that the thermal temperatures are not registering correcting on the cards/chips and that, therefore, is throwing off both the temperature reports as well as how soon/late the cooling mechanisms are going into affect=the overheating problem.
nVidia along with OEM manufacturers (companies such as Dell, Apple, Gateway, HP, etc.) are replacing the cards when this failure has been happening (provided the person with the card still has some sort of receipt to prove it in most cases--in the case of laptops, this has been a bit more complicated) and, in the meantime, nVidia had been working with the laptop manufacturers as well as a large number of motherboard companies to implement changes to the BIOS that would allow system fans and cooling to run sooner than they might normally to help try and compensate for the overheating situation for now.
According to nVidia (who, along with ATI/AMD and Intel are currently facing other problems right now of a serious nature), the problem appears to have stemmed from one of their suppliers providing fault materials. However, there hasn't been any confirmation as to whether or not the cards currently on the market or the computers (including just laptops) with those cards or chipsets within them which were sold beginning in August or this month are actually free of the problem or not (it's still too early to tell).
They are only replacing cards which have already failed because of this--not ones appear to still be working as they should, I should note.
Regardless, this has already led to their being sued over this and claims the company may have known of it as early as eight months prior to their initial announcement about it (when HP released a BIOS update for their laptops to supposedly help alleviate the overheating problem).
I have a GeForce 8800 GTS.... I also havent had any problems as yet... 
