1 - N's shareholders shudder a little

2 - N's customers jump with joy

Of the two extremes option 2 probably avoids N going into disrepute, maintains the brand/corporate identity & standards so I guess it looks as if shareholders will have to bite the bullet and invest trust in N's technical wizardry.

My laptop was affected by this. It uses Nvidia GPU+Turion. HP did extend warranty for certain models/serial number range and they have fixed this for free (although I specifically asked about extended warranty for this model and I doubt I would get it otherwise)

What I have noticed is motherboard revision changed after laptop was returned to me. Original laptop used Apollo rev1 (which I guess is mobo code-name?) the new one had rev5

...you know, that noise you get in some cartoons when someone badly fails. Some people argue it is 4 Wah's, but it depends which cartoon you watch :)

Basically Nvidia = FAIL in this particular case

Interesting. My wife's laptop is the dv6174ea, and that seems to crash in graphics intensive tasks (World of Warcraft, intensive for this laptop it seems).

Wonder if that's affected as well - time to go check the HP website.

Makes me glad (for now) that I've got 'Intel inside'

yes, your intel inside defines a new standard in SHITE graphics. well done!

seriously mate intel graphic chipsets are terrible compared to nv or amd. steer well clear or face crap colours and a blurry display! not to mention horrendous 3d performance

I think Dell xps 1330 is also affected. My laptop has been repaired by Dell twice, the graphics display just corrupted and dell support come and change the mainboard. I have another same failure less then 3 month after the first replacement. Hopefully they have fixed the problem so that I don't need a third time change.

I suspect it is the heat cause the chip to fail since I almost running it 24x7 and sometime the laptop can run very hot.

Would that be the blunderbus, then?

nyuk nyuk nyuk

It's "sombre" in the good old United Kingdom, chaps. It may be a US story but it's still a British website (I hope!). Maybe I should charge a pound a word for corrections? I'd be up to two quid by now.

I thought they said it was a poor material choice in the packaging.

That would mean that the fault would lie with Nvidia choosing the wrong material set for their product. I don't think TSMC do the packaging for them anyway, TSMC only provide a prototyping packaging service, they're just a wafer foundry and for volume product would ship whole wafers to an assembly house like, Amkor or Carsem or ASE or STATs etc etc.

Unless of course TSMC didn't passivate the Die properly or there was a problem with any stress relief (polyimide) coat that TSMC would have placed over the die.

Either way it's bad news for Nvidia.

Good heavens woman! More important things than the Queen's English? I need to go and have a lie down. Now, where's the "Shocked to the very core of my being" icon?

I've got an NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX in my tower system, and its fan screams at top speed whenever Vista awakes from sleep mode. The only way to shut it up is a reboot. NVidia have known about this problem for over 12 months, but don't seem capable of fixing it, so I'm not surprised they're in trouble.

Another victim of the XPS M1330 issue here, my work lappy decided to re-decorate itself with some lovely multi-coloured lines. Lovely!

Before that the GPU was reaching temps of nearly 90c (not sure why, VMware doesn't use the GPU...), needless to say that when I got the repaired machine back I underclocked everything and now run my VMs on ESX.

The real problem is that they call it English.. it might be derrived from, but the Merkinisation really makes it totally different. they really should drop the 'English' pretence, but until they do... Solder has an 'L' in it try pronouncing it, or we'll set the soddiers on you!

...I *just* worked on a Dell XPS laptop yesterday with the Nvidia 7900 Go video chipset. The video is failing... all kinds of artifacts on the bios screen and XP will load but not display unless it's in VGA mode....

Got to call India... I mean Dell today.

Sigh.... sure would be nice to know what chipsets are affected... bastards...

Intel inside ( I guess I can breathe easy)

By Kenneth Ross

Posted Thursday 3rd July 2008 07:34 GMT

Makes me glad (for now) that I've got 'Intel inside'

@ kenneth

By Liam

Posted Thursday 3rd July 2008 08:12 GMT

yes, your intel inside defines a new standard in SHITE graphics. well done!

seriously mate intel graphic chipsets are terrible compared to nv or amd. steer well clear or face crap colours and a blurry display! not to mention horrendous 3d performance

response to Liam.......

Everything relative, I guess. My laptop is a business, not a gaming tool, so

3D performance is not an issue. But if what you want is high-end laptop graphics, then I agree that you won't find them with an integrated Intel chipset.

"I would step over my own gran to get to an errant apostrophe."

I think I'm in love.

Nvidia have a long history of releasing broken hardware+driver combinations and a history of simply disabling broken features instead of fixing them. Over the years I've seen sound,firewall and basic network acceleration disappear, features that never worked well and seemed more about brand promotion than any real effort to deliver working hardware. Right now I've just ended 16 months without graphics driver updates waiting for them to restore even basic functionality to that went MIA.

Nvidia seem totally isolated from end-users, they just dont feel any need to fix problems those users have or really support old hardware when shiny new toys come along for the engineers to play with.

This time they can't just disable features for a quick 'screw the punters' fix - though I bet they tried.

If I remember correctly their original sound cards/chips were a massive success including 5.1 decoding etcetc.

Can't say their sound devices were a failure, just dont understand completely why they stopped, maybe it was standing in the way of monopolising graphics industry I dont know.

but you can't tar Nvidia with such a brush without even glancing at the horrors from other camps.

Intel made the i740, that was the last decent graphics to come out of that camp.

Ati's drivers became unusable when they added opengl capability

I had a 4mb xpert@play at the time! :)

Ati's Rage cards................I am not going to say anymore as I still have nightmares.

Matrox, seemed to refuse to try and keep up, and became specialist, the amount of patches you had to apply to programs and games just to get them to work with matrox cards was amazing.

Some games almost had their own matrox version.

via/sis et al, well they filled what intel fills now market wise.

and finally, at least Nvidia are taking the hit.

Fujitsu just pulled out of the desktop hdd market when their cirrus logic chips had hot dates.

and the electrolyte scandal also cost me and many others much money, when even well respected vendors got caught out with bad capacitors.

any incorrect grammar/spelling is purely down to me being a foriegner :)

I am in love too. What are you doing tonight? I have a 15,000 word Thesis to proof read... ;)

No idea about ATIs driver's since I use open-source driver's. The card's seem fine to me, though Ive been careful to pick one's which are supported (thing's are definitely improving in that respect). Intel graphic's hw tend's to be a bit slow but fine otherwise (curiously, faster for Xv textured video than the oldish-but-fast-enough ATI hw that I use), and nVidia… no, I refuse to be limited to whatever kernel version's they support, so Im completely unaffected by this problem :-)

Mines the one on the apostrophe-shaped hook.

This is exactly how it started with my laptop. First it started to hang every now and then later number of "hangs" started to raise and finally it just refused to boot.

If you google for it you'll see this is very common failure for these laptops. I think cooling system efficiency degrades with time (dust etc.). Combined with material weaknesses for some Nvidia chips and voila ! System fried...

Hi, since AMD bought ATI I don't use nVidia anymore personally. I won't sell Intel since the antitrust issues(which I have experienced). This will help sell more ATI GPU and the new Fusion CPU/GPU and more Hybrid Crossfree configurations.

"I've got an NVidia GeForce 7900 GTX in my tower system, and its fan screams at top speed whenever Vista awakes from sleep mode. The only way to shut it up is a reboot. NVidia have known about this problem for over 12 months, but don't seem capable of fixing it, so I'm not surprised they're in trouble."

Not suprising it does that--quit running Vista, since the 7 series were designed deep in the XP era. I've got a 7800 myself, on a good XP machine, and it *defintely* doen't make a huge amount of noise. (I have like 5-6 hooked up in it for max cooling and nice glowy effects. Need to kill the blue one, though--that came with the power supply...)

I'm also hearing impaired, so that could be a factor, too...

ATI Rage Fury Pro 32MB AGP still working great on this PIII 677 .. still driving the 2 Voodoo 2s (1998 12MB reference 3dfx boards) SLI fine too for the 10 year old games I still play

.. and a 7600 GT 512MB AGP has greatly extended the gaming usefulness of my not-so-old P4 3.0 HT XP machine too, solid stuff for WoW or IL-2, quiet as well

.. 200MMX still boots up fine, 1982 brown case C64 too !

point is, a CPU or GPU should basicly last *forever*

design and/or QA/testing problems like this getting out in the marketplace en masse is nearly inexcusable

I may rebuild a 200 MMX or a 233 this weekend, why cuz (lol) my other 1.8Ghz PC has a NVidia chipset which myspace/facebook stuff overheats.

HP released some information at http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01087277&lc=en&cc=us a while ago with a firmware update to increase the duty time of the fan.

As a precaution for all laptop owners - it's a good idea to locate the cooling fins on the side of your laptop every few months (where the warm air blows out); pick up your laptop and blow hard into that area - like a huge mouth organ! (Just don't breathe in immediately after.) You should see a small cloud of dust escape from the fan.

Is that semicolon supposed to go before or after the bracket?

Mine died yesterday, first the wifi chip stops showing in the windows hardware manager intermittently (it's on top of the GPU is some models), then the GPU blows.

From my own (possible incorrect) detective work, the common Nvidia based HP DV9xxx and DV6xxx are series that are significantly affected. In the US they extended the free warranty another year, but only for certain models, and this doesn't seem to be the case in the UK.

For the US:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&docname=c01087277&dlc=en

I'm going to try and get mine fixed free of charge as it's only 16 months old despite being in the UK. The typical symptoms (wifi dies, then GPU goes - 1 long beer and 2 short beeps) can also be found here:

http://www.topix.com/forum/computers/hp/T0MJR4DP7135S7QA6

Watchdog may also be picking this one up....

>From my own (possible incorrect) detective work, the common Nvidia based HP DV9xxx and DV6xxx are series that are significantly affected. In the US they extended the free warranty another year, but only for certain models, and this doesn't seem to be the case in the UK.<

Actually the UK is covered. I got an email (two months or so ago) about my Presario V6000 saying the warranty had been extended free for another year - so glad I registered it. But, touch wood, I've experienced no issues so far (about 11 months old), except for the 'i' key not always being immediately responsive.

>wifi dies, then GPU goes - 1 long beer and 2 short beeps<

Good to know what to look out for tho' as HP isn't that clear as to why the warranty was extended - or I'm thick.

I'll up your 15 000 word thesis with a 162 000 word general chemistry textbook.

Shouldn't that be "1 long beer and 2 short burps"?