Yesterday we reported about the major issue of NVIDIA G86 and G84 GPUs being defective. In their second quarter fiscal 2009 business update, NVIDIA detailed a $150 to $200 million dollar allocation to cover the anticipated costs for warranty, repair, replacement, etc. of “certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems.” This was clearly not good news, and of course the media jumped all over it.

The problem is rooted in a “weak” substrate material used in the production of these GPU ASICs, which is heat related and causes abnormally-high failure rates and overall decreased product lifetime. Despite NVIDIA’s suggestion that the problem was limited to certain batches of the GPUs, news websites like the INQUIRER claimed that the thought that NVIDIA would change the assembly process or materials for a batch of GPUs is absurd. Consequently, the INQ believes ALL G84 and G86 GPUs are affected by this problem.

Of course this is pretty serious business, and at this time both HP and Dell have taken action in response to what was undoubtedly a healthy amount of customer concern. HP is offering extended warranty support for notebooks using the bad parts in addition to a driver update. Dell has released a driver that increases fan speed in an attempt to ward off the thermal problems. It is believed that this is an attempt to prolong the life of the GPUs beyond the warranty period so the problem is minimized.

A report on DailyTech reveals that in addition to the 8600M and 8600M graphics chips, GeForce Go 7000 and 6000 product lines are also affected. Since NVIDIA uses the same ASICs for their professional class graphics parts, the Quadro NVS 135M and Quadro FX 360M graphics cards exhibit the problems as well.

This new information only enforces our belief that NVIDIA will need to beef up that $150-200 million allotment to take care of what will surely be a flood of complaints. NVIDIA’s tech support staff will be in our prayers.

Source: DailyTech

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