nVidia's faulty GPUs


The Inquirer reported back on July 9 that most if not all nVidia 8400M and 8600M chips made are faulty and can cause the notebooks they reside in to fail. According to APC, pretty much every brand worth mentioning--Acer, Apple, Asus, BenQ, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, LG, MSI, NEC, Sony, Toshiba--uses these chips in their portable offerings.

TUAW's Cory Bohon's had a nasty run in with a MacBook Pro that began with graphics / display issues. Also, the lads at Ars Technica have documented faulty portable woes, as well--striping, system freezes, garbled text, etc

There's an Apple discussion thread that details many of these problems--686 posts so far with the first dating back to March. And, yes, Apple has been accused of censoring the thread.

MacMall iPod Accessories


Made to fail

The mothership has attempted to patch the issue via firmware, without success. HP and Dell have tried the same also without success.

The reason software fixes have failed is that the problem lies with the chip's substrate--ie it's in the silicon itself, a design flaw in the ASIC (wiki) as in it gets hot and will stay that way until it dies. That is, the only thing running the cooling fan more (the focus of software fixes to date) will accomplish is killing battery and maybe push the eventual time of failure out far enough to make it an out-of-warranty issue.

If The Inquirer's analysis of the extent of the problem is correct, then tens millions of users are or will be affected.

Perhaps the "product transition" that Peter Oppenheimer Download, Play, Burn MP3s! No DRM. No Restrictions. No Worries.