Nvidia heat causing Macbooks to fail

makes me all warm and fuzzy when people who buy over priced products get burned. Hey Apple...why not just sell your OS..oh ya...then the sheep out there would not be able to look "cool" with their laptop at starbucks with the glowing apple on it.

On the apple support thread, this guy reckons he gets the same problem on an old ati-based MBP

I have a 17" Intel MBP-- but not a new 2008 machine and have been getting the black screen of death while playing WOW. It isn't just the new MacBooks or Pros. Apple needs to investigate this problem on both new and old models.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1767221&tstart=0

Interesting article. I remember a few months back when reviews were published about the new 9300 chipset. There was unnanimous praise about its performance and even about its cool-running characteristics. There must have been some serious cherry-picking by board manufacturers at that time.

Just last week, i had to upgrade my motherboard. I would have liked to go with a GeForce 9300 mobo, but none was readily available here (Canada).

So I got a 8200 with A64 X2 processor. When this chipset came out at the beginning of the year, there were reports that it was running too hot. My board is made by Asus and has a nice copper passive heatsink. The chipset/GPU on the board is Revision A2.

GPU-Z shows that temperature while working on the desktop is hovering around 52 degrees C. I understand this is acceptable. I have yet to try some games.

Hey Charlie.

I love that the link you provide at the bottom which is supposed to prove what you're talking about only deals with the 8600 GPU, which is only in on current MacBook Pro system. It says noting about anything in the 9000 series. I wish I could use proof that doesn't prove my point in life.. it would be much easier to win arguments.

An NV bashing article froming from The Inq and Charlie? We are shocked! Shocked I tell you!

Enuf said Charlie...
do one favour for me.. 
go make a flag of Nvidia logo; pin it on ur Tail 
buy a bunny suit this time ( green goblin shreky type )

Stop doing troll job in this magazine..

please.....
If I find ur name and I see that article is as long as some holy legend.. i just ignore it..

Do you think we are dumb ? 
all people who read Inq have a brain smaller than micro (u)?

I have lot more to say.. but am tired and sleepy now.. 
yawwn!!!
note: spell check or proof reading was done on my comments

I bet the problems of overheating are in Windows during a Bootcamp session trying to get 60FPS in Crysis. But still the thing should not do that. Patience is a virtue, always wait on new hardware and software (OS's), even with Apple.
I am glad I picked up my discontinued, soon to be in demand on ebay Black Macbook at 2.4Ghz with a 250Gb HD and 2Gb of RAM for what Apple wants for the crappy 2.1GHz white ones they still sell, hehe.
Like Tiger better than Leopard though, waiting for the slimed down and optimized Snow Leopard.
Macs are still the bomb.
PS don't waste your cash on Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. It is a piece of DRM bloatware. Pixelmator is much, much better for home usage.

Charlie,

I am an ATI fan myself so NV missteps tend to be positive news for me. But based on your current NV reporting string, I was wondering if Jensen ate your first born.

Mohiuddin, you know you should really stop reading this site. It seems to only upset you and make you post rude comments. Talk about being a troll, calling the kettle black? Maybe if you could actually investigate and come up with some proof that charlie is incorrect I might have more sympathy for your stance.

Hey, when I want a good dose of outright NVIDIA hatred and bias I can always come to "the INQUIRER" to get my fill. That's why I love Charlies rants so much, where else can one go for such unabashed, unwarranted, resentment of one of silicon valleys finest?

Geese, he must have been "burnt" by one of their products when he was little (get it Charlie, burnt, as in hot, oh man am I funny).

So the Macttards have melting Macbook lappies with NV 9400 Chippery. They are also living without Firewire on their Macbooks. Is it such a surprise that NV mobile chipsets are overheating? They were doing son in the recent past. Tell us something shockingly new, like that the 9600 in the new MBP is producing high end fruit flavored melting lappies.

OK. yes there has been problems with the chips nVidia is working to correct these issues. However.
ANY computer builder worth half his/her paycheck knows that the newer nVidia chips run hot. Apple failed to provide adequate cooling for the part and THEY are the ones to hold sole blame for that.
So now we have the Apple version of the Xbox-360. Nice unit that tends to overheat due to improper cooling. 
Black screen on 3D games? Makes me wonder if Apple is even feeding enough power to the thing as they tend to get VERY hungry while gaming. Not enough juice? The video says to heck with it and basically shuts down. I had that issue with my GTX-280 before installing a larger PSU in my desktop rig.

I wondering if, if any real appelites on the Simpson staff got burned by this? Or worst, the machines at work!

I'm all warm and fuzzy inside. Will sleep nicely tonight.

I found an Everex 17 inch on newegg, for some reason the price had dropped to 700 US, looked like a good deal so I bought it. I needed it for my music recording studio. The fan is on full bore constantly, never stops, thing is so loud as to be almost unusable. For those of you who who are angry with Charlie for his rant, he represents the average hard working folks like me who took their savings from months of work out of the bank to invest in a nice laptop, and wound up with a piece of crap they can't use. If you have a lot of disposable income, fine, but most of us don't and have to live with this, I now suspect the discount was because Everex and Nvidia knew this 8600M chipset was overheating and cleared this off the shelf, product was discontinued literally the day after I bought mine. There is no excuse for this.

Looking back, the majority of your stories are about nVidia. Of these, a hundred percent is about how immensely bad, evil and vicious the company and its products are. Of all these so called news, about 75% are either pure lies or at least overblown and full false information. Of all anti nVidia trolls, few have earned as bad a reputation as you have. How about those thousands of new layoffs? The kamikaze x86 CPU project? The notion that the $200 MUSD hit on GPU failure was a tip of an iceberg? The non existence of the 50nm nVidia GPU? And this my friend, is just the false rumors you’ve been spreading the last few weeks. Even if I suspect that your source is either your imagination or a certain nVidia competitor, it would help if at least some of your news turned out to be correct or if you even once wrote about the good stuff; regardless of your personal hurt feelings from the day the stopped sending you free video cards. Grow up.

Close, Charlie, oh so close.

Industry convention is Ax is first base layers ("hot process" steps up to the polysilicon), with metal interconnect revision x. Usually you throw in extra logic gates as fill when you place and route the chip which allows you to make many changes in metal without having to re-spin the very expensive masks for base layers. Depending how many wafers you kept parked before metal you can make many changes very quickly.

So the Bx silicon is merely silicon that took base layers to fix. That can be for a simple reason like not being able to meet timing for all corners with a metal fix, or something major like totally reworking a macro. You can't tell.

B2 isn't a bad level for going to production if it's your first run in that geometry. I've seen projects go to Dx levels if they were complicated enough SoCs.

"Apple isn't at fault here"... oh COME ONE! So are we to believe that Charlie was all in the know about Nvidia's shortcomings, but Apple engineers were completely clueless? Are we supposed to believe that Apple didn't have a responsibility to do thorough stress-testing? There are extremely reliable statistical methods for stress-testing components that will yield failure rates in the real world. Unless Nvidia fraudulently cherry-cherry-picked engineering samples and then only cherry-picked production parts, Apple should have been able to predict this as well.

Nice source... did you even read it before you wrote your article? Or did you just look at the pretty picture you found?

Reminds me about your new "Treo" pic from this summer

Seriously....all these Macbooks being sold by Apple this Christmas ALL COULD have this issue. We saw this with the 8600GT cards and AGAIN with the 9400 series cards. I wouldnt be surprised if the macbook pros have the same problem!! Granted they are using 9600's but heck, its still made by Nvidia. 

Come on everyone, look at these Apple machines, they are all metal, thin, ZERO PROPER airflow. OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO OVER HEAT!! Hello Apple! 

I blame Apple for not TESTING their hardware, and I blame Nvidia for making crappy GPU's. 

Apple....next time around USE ATI/AMD.

Forget my favourite; nVidia quits chipset business. We are still waiting Charlie.

plunge an Nvidia "engineer" into a bucket of titties and he would still come out sucking his thumb.


Let's get real here... these are Apple computers and we all know that no self-respecting Apple owner with anything older than the current model... so an Apple computer only ever needs to last long enough to get you to the next model.

I've had my macbook since late october, and I've had no problems. I currently have Fallout 3, Medieval Total War, and Hearts of Iron 2: Doomsday installed on my xp partition and I haven't experienced any problems. I also have the cpu, and gpu overclocked. I wanted to see how much overhead the new nvidia chipset had, and it's not to shabby as far as I'm concerned. I've got about a 10% overclock right now - while using the windows side, which I only use for gaming - and I was able to push it to about 12% before becoming unstable.

You asked me to point out a single wrong fact, Axiomatic. You also state that it takes time for the 'news' to emerge. Of course, given all that time, I can proudly produce some ground braking news. nVidia and Intel will stop producing design based on silicon and move to new technology. nVidia will change their logotype. In less than a hundred years they will even change CEO. But when Charlie reports of a 20% cut in staff, it is not credible to believe that he means the next recession in 2018. When he talks about $200 MUSD being miscalculated, is he expecting us to believe that the cost will occur in a distant future?

Furtunally, some news are about things that Charlie knows will not happen. Those are easier to verify. Like when he told us that there were no 55nm GPU's after the conference call where they actually made up the majority of the shipments.

So, Charlie, eh, I mean, Axiomatic, when will we see those massive new layoffs? Right after the recession?


Funny how this just keeps going on and on...

I haven't checked my school's email for a while. We get our Dell D630 laptops from the school on a lease term. Recently I've realized that I can no longer run Compiz Fusion in Linux due to lockups and corruption. When I did check the email this morning, there's a bios update A13 regarding GPU overheading. The NVS135 chip was I believe based on the 5000 or 6000 series GPUs from nvidia and I was hoping it wouldn't be an issue but I was proven wrong.

When I got the laptop a year and a half ago, the NVS135 was already on the obsolete and unsupported list on nvidia's site and I'm still using a 2+ year old driver!!! Kind of like how they dropped support for the Ti4200 that I bought with VIVO when they decided not to support VIVO then just dropped support for the whole card all together! I had to get a Radeon 9600XT cus the 4200 didn't have a media center driver!!!

And I don't know what all the hype about nvidia drivers are all about...I had to recover WinXP six years ago after getting a black screen on the Ti4200 due to the drivers and white screen of death is still common in Linux XGL/Compiz!!! I've never had problems with ATI drivers since the first Radeon and am still happy about how it just works and supports cards all the way back to the first Radeon!

I've had ATI cards including...Rage, Rage Pro 128, Radeon AIW, 7500, 9600, 9800, 1800xl, 1900XT, 3870 and I have no complaints other than the Rpro128 nine years ago. I tried nvidia and decided it didn't meet my standards when I saw visual artifacts on stock every half a minute in 2D operations!!!

If you hate what charlie writes about nvida...you should go read something else!!! Don't come here and defend nvidia just because you own some of their products!

Listen,
Let us finally put this silly argument to rest. It is so tiresome and we ought to move past the "I hate your company" stage - it was fun (I know) but it is boring now.

I agree with all of you out there, and here, that say there are a large segment of idiots posing as consumers, which flock to the most expensive article for sale simply to look cool.
I myself don't like having an aluminum computer, it hurts my fingers... but alas

What can we do about these superfluous fools who buy anything Apple because they believe it is a way to gain status? Shoot them in the head and be done with it. Or, just ignore them. I don't care either way, but it does bother me ever so little, the generalization that ALL people who bought an Apple computer are idiots.

You see, there are a reasonably large number of 'us' people who enjoy the Apple OS because... (waiting for the worms to come)... OS X is the best operating system available right now... (waiting for the worms to come)...
I don't want to try and prove that last statement to you and I don't care if you think I am right or wrong.

I'm not brainwashed. I'm not lying. I just got tired of Windows XP's ugliness. I used XP for three years and, honestly, it was fine. It was also a pain in the arse because every time I did the slightest thing it asked me some inane question, like "are you sure you want to do this, idiot?" Either that, or it notified me of something I did not want to be aware of like, "You've just turned on your computer, idiot."
I am exaggerating about the annoyances of XP, but only a little. You really have to spend a lot of time tinkering around with XP, editing registry settings/deleting certain files or folders/etc, in order to get it to 'shut up.' In addition, it is practically mandatory that you reformat your computer once every six months, unless you enjoy watching your computer age right before your eyes as it appears to slowly crawl to a halt.

The sole reason I like OS X, and hence bought an Apple computer, is because the majority of my time spent on the computer is no longer occupied thinking about the computer. Now that I've set the recycle bin to not display a warning and my home network is up... I simply never see a question from my computer. Like it or not, for the most part it is true that... OS X 'just works.' 

And, screw Apple. I don't care about them in the least. I'm a penny pincher and I don't like that they've got me, and anyone else who wants a good OS, over a barrel.

Let me briefly take this moment to tell the Linux sufferers that after three separate attempts with Ubuntu, I'd rather give up computing all together, forever, than use Linux. No, Linux is not a solution. Linux is the equivalent of enrolling yourself in a computer science class. If, like me, you thought Windows XP was alright but annoying, you WILL hate Linux.
I really wish nothing more than to have a free OS, but again, Linux is NOT a solution.

Back to the matter at hand, if anyone should have the right to be upset at Apple, or to hate Apple users, it is the Apple user like myself who understands quite well that the Apple hardware is little more than an Asus machine re-branded, and marked up 1000%. We buy the OS, dear friends. When you see us in line and we are smiling and happy, we are happy because we are buying the OS.

Still, I don't hate Apple and I don't hate Microsoft, but I am bothered that instead of actually bearing down and writing a damn good OS, Microsoft STILL would rather buy (through actually buying or price gouging its own software) its customers than win them with a good product. This is also a symptom of Apple's tying its software to its hardware. If Apple would put OS X out for all computers, MSFT would eventually have to do something about its icky product, right?

At least you can say that MSFT is willing to play ball, is competing. Apple is the little boy who own the only good ball, but runs home with it so that no one else can play it unless they play in his backyard. The rest of the neighborhood has the half flat ball which more often is used as a dog toy. Unfair, and nobody likes that kid, but I guess I am playing in his backyard at the moment though. It'll only be a matter of time before someone comes along and slaps that kid in the head, takes his ball, and we can all play again at the public court. You can see people attempting to do that now with hackintosh and Psystar... I can't wait until Apple's mommy (U.S. legal) finally decides to tell him to go and play with everyone else or sit there with his thumb up his... ahem.

In the mean time, please, look at what is on the table right now. Windows XP is a little long in tooth for anyone and Vista is simply just not a good OS. Vista, with 4GB of Memory, a very fast computer, and a full 24 hours worth of tweaking by someone who knows the OS very well is alright - but OS X is good, perhaps better, with a half spec'd computer and no tweaking at all. If you were to purchase a computer with Vista, you'd need to spend quite a bit more than the price tag reflects in order to use it in a way comparable to the actual price of a mac. the macbook is, without a doubt, the best deal in computing today. The specs are fine and the OS is great. Still, for many users the macbook is like playing basketball with a tennis ball... entirely feasible, but not the same game, and not as much fun.

I think what I am trying to say is that We'd all like to see OS X available for any computer, but with the recent Psystar defeat I am less confident that will happen soon. In the meantime, instead of focusing on the obvious idiot who buys a mac because he lacks so many other redeeming qualities, please focus on the fact that a damn fine OS is locked to a specific hardware manufacturer in CA. Hate the boy who ran away with the ball, not the others who followed him because they wanted to play. We don't like this kid, Apple, anymore than you do... we just want the ball.

If we can get OS X, alone, without Apple hardware (which is nothing but the same hardware that everyone else is using), we'll have better products from Apple and Microsoft. 

Finally, you all can go to hell. I afforded a $2000 computer and I don't regret it at all. So I ate ramen for a few months, all in all, it has been totally worth it!

Cheers to the Inq for being one of the most poorly edited sites on the internet, and at the same time one that I continually find myself wasting time at.

You guys hate on Charlie like he's always wrong or something. Can you point out where in one of these nvidia stories he got his facts wrong?

Sometimes it has taken time for the truth to come to light, but in every on that I have followed so far his opinion usually is found to have been correct.

Don't be so bitter nvidia fanboys.

I've been following the Black Screen of Death problem on the Apple support forums. This problem manifests itself on the discrete GPU, not the chipset.

maybe old but this is interesting - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377

"In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. "

Not sure if the new problems are also packaing defects, but interesting to see what it is.

To those who are blaming Apple for this, you guys clearly have no clue on what they do in designing notebook systems. They are not some 3rd party vendors slapping system together using off-the-shelf components.

Love my Unibody MBP - but there is currently an SMC issue with the thermal sensors/ fans not effectively ramping up to dissipate the heat from the computer quickly enough. This IS an Apple issue since they control the firmware on the computer. My fans stay around 2000 rpm while the CPU A Diode raises to over 109c. When the fans come on and work - I don't have lockups or freezes. So perhaps some of the NVidia chips are faulty but if Apple can't keep them cool enough to operate due to an Apple error with their firmware, it's not the chip's fault... You bought a whole laptop - not just one part. They all work together or there are problems such as what we are looking at....

Apple QA should have done random sample-testing on each batch of chips they get. Isn't that would QA is suppose to do? Why are you guys still paying for a "premium" on an apple laptop, computer, mp3 players, or iphone? Wasn't the premium suppose to guarantee quality... so it seems apple f up here imo. Just like if a car manufacturer got a shipment of bad car cpu from an outside vendor, isn't the car manufacturer suppose to issue a recall? Nvidia already said they put aside money for the chip issue. It is up to each individual client (dell, hp, etc...) to decide how best to handle it.