Dud Nvidia GPUs tip up in Dell laptops
Not just HP, then...
Dell says ten laptop models have been sucker-punched by the GPU problems affecting Nvidia chipsets.
The company said on Friday that Dell laptops including Inspiron, Latitude and XPS models, could suffer glitches from a weak die/packaging material set that may fail with graphic processing unit (GPU) temperature fluctuations.
Nvidia had claimed earlier this month that the fault was limited to Hewlett-Packard laptops – Dell’s announcement late last week shows it is more widespread.
On 2 July, Nvidia said it planned “to take a one-time charge from $150m to $200m against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems”.
GPUs affected produce intermittent symptoms during early stages of failure, said Dell, including multiple images, random characters and lines on the screen, and no video.
The PC vendor advised customers to flash their system BIOS to help reduce the likelihood of GPU issues, but added that anyone already experiencing temperature fluctuations should contact Dell direct for support.
Nvidia was not immediately available for comment. ®
COMMENTS
RE: Support, what support?
If you have a XPS ring the xps support line, mine died about a month ago now on a sunday night, rang on monday, engineer was out replacing the mobo and LCD the next day. I've never trusted email, always too slow for people to reply
B***ards!
Took them THREE MONTHS to recognise my XPS had a problem enough to repair it! THREE MONTHS of constant harassment and calls. When they eventually replaced the GPU it worked fine (its been replaced twice). It still occasionally goes weird but works again if I close the lid and open it again.
I had to buy another laptop during that time because I needed a computer. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!! My next computer will be a mac!
Just maybe they should take the hit and replace all the dud GPUs?
Had this problem with a laptop at work - phoned Dell: they insisted that I update the BIOS/NVIDIA drivers - a couple of days later problem returned - phoned them up again but I couldn't match the symptoms on their script so this time we had to reinstall the OS (they couldn't find anything else wrong with it) - waiting for it go wrong again: at least this time they won't have an excuse (I hope).
At least the guys in phone centres do seem to know about this issue...
Toasty chips- Yummy
Nvidia are claiming that the problem is only isolated to certain batches of G84 and G86 GPUs and doesn't affect everything. (In response to allegations from theinquirer.net (I promise never to mention that publication again!))
If this is the case then it should be real easy to know who got what. Nvidia would track the lot number and know which computer manufacturer got what lot. The manufacturer in turn should know by the service tag which customer got a dodgy graphics card. Should be nice and easy.
However Nvidia haven;t released any info on this only the vague statement of "Die/Package material set weakness". If it only affected a limited number of lots then they should be able to tell us how many and the precise nature of the weakness so we can tell if it's a genuine concern or not.
I think there's probably two chances of that happening though.
....still waiting
Finally got a reply to warranty request email, (timed 4.30am) gave them all the info that they requested and still no reply.
The email states I must be available at the address stated for the next two days betwee 9 and 5.
So much for same business day response to email, so much for Next Business Day repair.
Paris... because even she can figure out what Next Business Day means.
Oh.. for anyone interested... the ^&^*&^*&* at Dell charge £70+vat for a 2 year extension to the XPS 1330 warranty but if you have an account with them it's only £60. Took them 36 hours to quote me for that.
