08/29/2008, 3:40pm, EDT
Friday, August 29thNVIDIA's GeForce 9 also hit by failures?
NVIDIA's widely publicized video chip failures may also touch on the most recent GeForce 9 series as well as older models, if data leaked to The Inquirer are authentic. The documents allege that NVIDIA has ordered a change in conductor material to fix the problem not only for GeForce 8 cards made on a 65 nanometer process, such as the 8800 GT, but also many cards using the newer 55 nanometer technique for the same chips; this would expand the failures to include most GeForce 9 series parts
The company has already made its component switch and should be shipping functional cards but also notes in the memo that it will continue shipping cards built with the older material until supplies run out. The move is estimated to leave many of the potentially defective cards on sale until some cards based on the platform are drained entirely.
Consequences of the slow changeover could be particularly dire with claimed failure rates as high as the "teens" for the 8800 GT and higher still for the 9600 GT, according to the claim.
NVIDIA has publicly maintained that the issue is limited to a handful of notebook processors but has been caught understating the nature of the issue in the past, at first saying only HP was affected but was ultimately forced to recognize the issue affecting Dell notebook owners.
Filed under: peripherals, digital imaging
Other story tags: Dell, NVIDIA, HP, GeForce
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Applies to which Macs?
In my iMac is a 8800 GS; affected too?
I believe so
From what I have read every 8xxx series cards are affected.
The only failure
is Charlie Demerjian, original Inquirer's author. But the real problem is you have to be more loud, not more technically correct, to be heard over the net.
NVIDIA did the right thing by announcing they have a problem and they are ready to address it. If they didn't do it no one would ever know about faulty NV chips - any particular failure could be the result of bad laptop design and nothing more. But NVIDIA have to stay on good terms with OEMs so they took the part of the blame.
Next comes the Inquirer, the most unreliable and most technically incorrect (in some cases even illiterate) source on the net. To know what Inquirer is you have to read their stuff on regular basis, as I do. AFter all they trade in rumors, and for rumors you have to consider every single source.
So, Charlie catches up to the news and starts his favourite sport: NVIDIA bashing. No problem with that, except more respectful news agencies on the net start reprinting what Inquirer said as a comment to original NVIDIA announcement. It still goes on, with thousands clueless sods blaming their troubles with video solely on 8xxx overheating problem.
For all of you with NVIDIA chips in their Macs: stay calm. NVIDIA chips are assotiated with host of other problems, like poor driver support for pro apps in Mac OS, but overheating just isn't going to happen on Mac.
NVIDIA GPU
I've used NVIDIA for years and only had one fail due to my intentional use of a third party overclocking tool. While this article comments about the NVIDIA GPU 8XXX and 9XXX having a lot of problems with the design it doesn't say what those problems are. I'm wondering how many of these are due to PEBKAC and how many are actually hardware/software related?