INQUIRER confirms Apple Macbook Pros have Nvidia bad bump material
WHEN THE NEW Macbooks came out a few weeks ago, Nvidia stated that the chips they provided to Apple did not contain the proverbial 'bad bumps'. Unfortunately for them, an investigation led by The Inquirer proves that not to be the case.
Background
If you recall, Nvidia has been in the spotlight all summer for failing chips due to bad materials and thermal stress. The end result is that bumps, the tiny balls of solder that hold a chip to the green printed circuit board it sits on, crack, and the computer it is in dies. If you want the full technical analysis, read this article (and parts 2 and 3).
Nvidia took a $200 million charge over the problem in July, but the firm refuses to support its customers by saying which parts are defective, and what computers they were sold in. You can get some clue from message boards, with Dell, HP, and Apple being prominent victims.
Nvidia says that the problem only affects notebooks, HP says otherwise. Nvidia assures manufacturers that their machines won't have problems, manufacturers say otherwise.
In the end, what you have is a massive cover-up that keeps affected customers in the dark. Doing right by them would cost a lot of money, which says a lot about the reason for a cover up. Fixed parts with a new 'material set' - basically new bumps and underfill - were phased into production starting in mid-summer, and the old, defective bumps are being sold off slowly alongside the new.
The question of the season is whether or not the brand new Macbook was designed and sold with 'bad bumps'. Nvidia told us directly that the chips were not using the 'bad bumps', and we took their word for it even though internal Nvidia sources were telling us that this was not the case.
One thing to keep in mind however, is that these bumps are so small that they are virtually invisible to the naked eye. In this case, they are about 100 micrometers in diameter, near the diameter of a human hair. To complicate things, they are permanently sandwiched between the chip die and the green fibreglass carrier, the bumps literally solder the two together. They are then covered with an epoxy-like material called underfill.
Nvidia could have shipped chips with bumps made of peanut butter and said that they were gold. As long as the chips functioned, there was almost no way of knowing exactly what they were made of. It is a pretty safe bet for Nvidia to call the parts good publicly, even Apple might not bother to check up on them. Again.
To say definitively what the bumps are made of, you would need to buy a Macbook off the shelf, disassemble it, desolder the chips, saw them in half, encase them in lucite, and run them through a scanning electron microscope equipped with an X-ray microanalysis system like this.
That is exactly what we did.
The Science
Here is the G96 cut in half, ready for analysis
Yes, you read that right, a brand new 15-inch Macbook Pro was purchased in California as soon as they went on sale. This was an off-the-shelf part, not a review sample, not a gift, but a normal model that hundreds of thousands of you bought. It was then secreted to a small lab of mad scientists who do not wish to be named, fearing repercussions from Nvidia and Apple.
These well-meaning boffins took it apart, desoldered the parts, and cut the defenseless notebook into many pieces. With meticulous care, they then ran it through multi-million dollar tools that would tell them exactly what materials the bumps used. Exactly.
This is what most of the Macbook Pro motherboard looks like
The motherboard of the new 15-inch Macbook Pro looks like this (above), with the heat pipes removed. There are basically three chips on it, the Intel CPU on the bottom, the Nvidia MCP79 chipset, and the Nvidia G96 CPU. The MCP79 is marketed under the name 9400M, and the G96 is called a 9600M GT GPU, but we may refer to them as just the 9400 and 9600 in this article.
The bumps have two possibilities, new and old, good and bad respectively. According to Nvidia documentation, the 'bad bumps' consist of mostly lead, 95% lead (Pb) in fact, with the remainder being tin (5% Sn). That is why they are called high-lead bumps. The newer 'good bumps' are called eutectic, and what they do differently is explained in great detail in the technical links at the top of the article. As far as composition goes, they are about two-thirds tin (63% Sn) and one third lead (37% Pb).
An electron microscope image of the chipset bump with analysis
Here is a closer look at the bump.
An electron micrograph of a 9400 chipset bump
Take a closer look at a portion of the graph that contains the elements in question.
Material analysis of the 9400 bump
Even if you don't have a degree in material science, you can plainly see that there are two big clumps in the graph. The two-pronged one on the right is tin, and there is notably more of it than there is lead, the spike on the left. This means the bumps on the MCP79/9400 are made of eutectic material (63% Sn, 37% Pb), and they are 'good'. Nvidia's story checks out so far.
Take a look at the same data for the 9600.
9600 micrograph and analysis, coloured red for ease of reading
And again, a closeup of the bump.
A good close look at a 9600 bump
And once again a close-up of the graph. (Please note that the original was black and white, we filled it in with red for clarity)
Part of the 9600 analysis, the tail was cropped for readability
Even a communications major can tell that there is one big spike at lead (Pb) and a very small one at tin (Sn). This would fit the profile of high lead (95% Pb, 5% Sn), and is radically different from the 'good bumps' of the 9400. The 9600 is unquestionably using 'bad bumps', directly contradicting the statements from Nvidia.
If you want more evidence, look at the surfaces of the bumps in the pictures above. Eutectic solder has a melting point that is the same for all components. When it cools, you should get an even physical structure with a fairly consistent grain. That is what you see on the 9400. With non-eutectic solder, the component that cools first should clump, and you can see that on the surface of the 9600.
More Problems
You will notice that we stated in the beginning of the article that Nvidia said the bumps in the chips were good, and you can see from the above data, this is definitely not the case. The computer that 'donated' it's guts for the above analysis was a 15-inch Macbook Pro, purchased off the shelf in California. There was nothing special about it, not a press sample, not even a pre-production version. This is what Nvidia said was good.
How did they say that? Below is the last mail in an email chain between the author and Mike Hara, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications at Nvidia. Phone numbers and email addresses were removed, and only the formatting was slightly changed for readability. It was sent at 1:52PM CST on October 15, 2008, titled "RE: 9300/9400 materials sets". The emails appear here in reverse chronological order.
[Begin Email]
oops, sorry.
Michael Hara - NVIDIA Corporation - Vice President of Investor Relations - ( 408) xxx-xxxx - Fax: (408) xxx-xxxx
=======================================================
-----Original Message-----
From: Charlie Demerjian [mailto:charlie@xxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 11:44 AM
To: Michael W Hara
Subject: Re: 9300/9400 materials sets
I assume you mean 9400, not 6400.
Michael W Hara wrote:
> Charlie,
>
> The 9300/6400 and 9600 discrete all use the new material set.
>
>
> Michael Hara - NVIDIA Corporation - Vice President of Investor
Relations
> - (408) xxx-xxxx - Fax: (408) xxx-xxxx
>
> =======================================================
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Charlie Demerjian [mailto:charlie@xxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2008 9:27 AM
> To: Derek Perez; Michael W Hara
> Subject: 9300/9400 materials sets
>
> Guys,
> The obvious question of the day is, what materials set is used on
> the 9300/9400 and the discrete 9600 used in the macbooks?
>
> -Charlie
[End Email]
As you can see, the question was asked the day after the new Macbooks came out, and it is quite clear in naming all three potential parts, 9300, 9400, and discrete 9600. There is no nuance, and the then brand new Macbooks are directly named. As we have proven above, the statement in that email is simply not true.
One problem that journalists run into every so often is that PR people don't always tell the truth. They usually do, but every once in a while, they don't. Sometimes this gets found out, and that inevitably leads to a very embarrassing story, sometimes it doesn't. The only down side to this for the PR person is their getting caught with their corporate pants down, and the inevitable hit to their reputation.
The problem this time is that Mike Hara is not PR, he is IR, Investor Relations. His main job is to deal with stockholders and analysts, and is consequently under a very different set of rules when speaking to such people. People buying and selling stock expect, and are required to get honest answers to the questions that they ask.
The legal boundaries for IR are the same for talking to analysts, stockholders, the milkman or the press.
Analysis
So, what does this all mean? It suggests that there are 15-inch Macbook Pros being sold with 'bad bumps', the same materials that brought down so many HP, Dell and Apple parts, both laptop and desktop. For some odd reason, Nvidia really does not want you to know this.
The first and most obvious question is, does Apple know? Repeated calls to Apple PR were not returned prior to this story, and while that looks pretty damning, it isn't. Apple will not talk to journalists unless they are assured the response will be fawning, and we do not fit that mold. That said, given the history between Apple and Nvidia, it could go either way.
When we ran our finding past Nvidia prior to publication, Mike Hara replied: "You asked me specifically if the 9400 and 9600 used in the MacBooks were free of all bad bumps. I responded to you that the combination of material underfill and bump is different from the combination that was exhibiting the bump crack field failures earlier in the year."
We find this problematic. If the bumps were not a problem at all, why were they changed on the 9400? The 9400 is a much cooler-running chip than the 9600, so why change the part that is less likely to die? If the 9600 with 'good bumps' is being phased in, why bother with the qualification costs, time, and inventory hassles if it is not a problem?
The other problem comes down to heat. The new Macbooks run hot, very hot. The net is filled with reports of them overheating and hanging. This is most often seen when gaming, a task that stresses the GPUs hard, and results in a 'black screen of death'. These beasties run extremely hot.
On the surface, the explanation of the Macbooks not getting hot enough to crack the bumps doesn't stand up. If it is hot enough to sear the flesh off your thigh, it is likely more than able to reach an internal temperature of 60-80C, the point where the underfill softens. If the chips get hot enough to crash, it is unlikely they are running within prescribed thermal boundaries.
If you assume the engineering work was done, and done correctly to keep the 9400 and 9600 in the correct thermal range, why didn't Nvidia simply say so? Barring a total failure of their lot-tracking system, they had to have known the Macbooks shipped with 'bad bumps'.
The Future
What do you do from here? At the moment, the simple answer is: avoid the 15-inch Macbook Pro. While there is no assurance that the high-lead bumps will cause a failure, given their history, we cannot recommend that you take the chance.
Apple and Nvidia need to clearly mark which machines have the 'bad bumps' so consumers can decide for themselves. Given that Nvidia claims to be transitioning from high-lead to eutectic bumps, it is only a matter of time until the high-lead inventory is depleted, and the Macbooks are safe to buy.
Until that time, you would be well advised to avoid these potentially problematic notebooks. µ
Note
In a statement just before publication, Nvidia's Mike Hara had the following comment on the situation. "The GeForce 9600 GPU in the MacBook Pro does not have bad bumps. The material set (combination of underfill and bump) that is being used is similar to the material set that has been shipped in 100s of millions of chipsets by the world's largest semiconductor company."
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This is great! Now INQ readers can skip the telly, and get their CSI fix (Charlie Semiconductor Investigation) right here on the INQ.
Thanks for writing this great article (as requested). Most excellent!
nVidia said in their previous statement that they would fix their material set to correct the problem. You found bad bumps, but nVidia claims they're using a stronger glue this time around. So technically, they've switched to a "more robust material set", but they obviously haven't fixed the root of the previous problem - bad bumps. Glue might work, but the solder might crack nonetheless. Maybe you guys should crank up the heat on the boards and see how the chips handle themselves.
Clever of nVidia though - they don't actually say "bad bumps" at all in their statements or emails.
Hi Charlie
Love your work, but it seems that your stories are being ignored by other web medias ?
Is that because they are afraid of nvidia or is it because your stories are wrong :-)
Wkr.
DK_Charlie_fan
I though Charlie had been quiet for a while... this article explains what hes been up to...
I found this article interesting. Bought a 15" Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz on the day it was released from the Apple Store on Regent Street, London. I've played Spore for hours, Civ IV for days, and done a lot of video editing. I always have the GPU enabled. And I have NEVER experienced even on lock up as described. That's not to say that there aren't problems as decribed above, but I just wanted to assure people that not all of the Macbook Pros are faulty.
So it looks like the Nvidia 9300/9400 (as used in the MacBook) is ok then
So you'll probably be wanting to publish a correction to your previous article:
"Nvidia heat causing Macbooks to fail"
Right?
Plus, they may actually be doing the right thing by using stronger glue
- have to done any analysis on chips from other manufacturers (Intel, AMD etc) to see how the nVidia Materials Set compares to these ones?
I dont usually read long articles, and I know the Charlie is sometimes biased, but I thought this was a very interesting and fair article. Its amazing to see them constantly lie! Ah well cant fault nVidia for consistency.
Hi Charlie
http://www.dvhardware.net/article31847.html
Please check that they have changed the underfill, Hi Lead bumps is not a problem by it self.
Lead content is a violation of ROHS. Non ROHS equipment is not allowed in Europe.
I wonder how they skipped ROHS(green) tests..
I found this article both interesting and informative. Keep it up Charlie D.
I've got a Dell Vostro with a 8400M in it, and on these cold days has been booting up into corrupt graphics. It's fine after a reboot...but for how long?
Dun dun duuuuun :D
Whatever you think of Charlie, whatever you think of the Inq... what you have now is INCONTROVERTIBLE evidence of the lies and cover-ups of nVidia. These parts have been REPEATEDLY proven to be at higher risk of failure... yet, the knee-jerk reaction of fanbois is to defend, defend, defend to the end. Sad, really. I guess people just hate the thought of thinking that yes, a company would take their hard earned cash despite the problems that exist.
nice artcile, shitty new layout
nice article - nice layout. I like it!
Bumps are exempt from RHOS, so it's legal in the EU....
http://www.rohs.gov.uk/content.aspx?id=17
Basically, they're not stupid, you know...
Well done Charlie.
This new layout is more formal, not like INQ at all.
I just would like to congratulate the author, it is a brilliant piece of work/investigation. I can imagine that it must have been cost both lots of time and money to make this article but the reality is that only this type of work can reveal the truth about what companies are really up to. So well done charlie its work like this that needs to be made public more often.
Tis still in effect but expires in 2010. Nvidia had better be figuring out how to use the "new" materials by then.
Do me a favour and note his previous news. He's reports are more than 75% wrong.
New massive layoffs aften the first round? Still waiting.
A x86 CPU? Still waiting.
Massive failure rates on old chips? Just not true.
Abnormal failure rates on new macbook chips? Just not true. In fact, they are very reliable.
Hara is over on CNET Lying about this. CNET has an article talking about this article on their site. It's one thing to make an accusation, but when you disassemble the product and prove that it has bad bumps, NVidia should just come clean and admit they screwed up, but you know that they won't. NVidia may as well just get in line at Congress to request a bail out because Bumpgate plus the RAMBUS lawsuit will hit their stock price and knock them off their feet.
Excellent work Charlie, I'm really impressed you took this to the limit and really proved what's going on at Nvidia. I almost bought a 9600 m chip in a laptop 2 days ago. I thought that maybe they had managed to get the fix out for them by this time and held back the bad chips, but decided it wasn't worth the risk. The next day I read this article and was VERY glad I did not buy that laptop.
Thanks Charlie for helping me avoid a stinker. Unfortunately I own 2 8800 GTS, wonder when they will fail.
Keep up the good work.
Charlie, I gotta give it to you mate, it's friggin brilliant!
You deserve a raise!
Nvidia + fanboys, HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?
HAHAHAHAHAHAH
Charlie,
This is the kind of periodism I respect! Holy sh*t! I just hope this is a bacth, because i just bought a laptop with a 9700m gt chip, which is virtually the same as the 9600.
KUDOS! Ahhh, and btw, uk.theinquirer.net doesn't work anymore, so I guess I wasn't the only one that was isolated from its favourite newspage until i tried another option. Andd... congrats for the new layout!
"bad bumps" do not equate to lead bumps or eutectic bumps. You proved the base materials of the bumps - so what? Nvidia says that the cracking bumps were displaced by a new material process. You have not proved that the bumps on your example had cracks. I see none - none were observed or noted. So the materials on the 9600 are "pure" lead - this has been in existence since cave man times and has been used in the industry excessively until the new RHOS requirements. Show me the cracks in the material, show me actual performance degradation due to the 9600 bumps - and maybe I'll believe some of what you have implied here - without irrefutable evidence - you have no leg to stand on.
Thorough work indeed Charlie, but even if we let aside the fact that you don't have any dignity or integrity to be an objective and worthy journalist, I have to ask: why do you see so much trouble to even use multimillion equipment to bring a down a company? Why? It would help nobody. Actually it would just bring trouble but you seem to have some kind of a personal agenda with this one.
Cheers
"Bad bumps" might not necessarily equate to the solder compound, but the email thread certainly implies otherwise.
Oh, gosh, I wonder who this story could benefit if it turned out to be true? This one's really taxing... oh... maybe a huge rival GPU maker which is resurging in the GPU market at the moment, and just waiting for some cockup like this by its main competitor, NVidia?
That same company which Charlie is well known for preferring over NVidia?
Or, maybe a certain big CPU maker that does a bit of integrated graphics on the side, currently having a tetchy relationship with NVidia?
A lot of people stand to make a lot of money if reports like this turn out to be true. Charlie's gone too far to just be doing this for the fun of it. He kicked up quite the storm a few months earlier with much less scientific evidence, remember.
I think the answer is, all consumers... I for one loves being informed. I'm sure plenty of others appreciate this kind of investigative work. AMD might prosper at the expense of Nvidia, but that's not Charlie's fault.
Even though I'm not an nvidia fanboi, it still kind of gets on my nerve with Charlie constantly bashing them up without solid proof. Whether this article will be accepted or rejected is another story. But good work into the research and publishing of this article. One of the better reads on Inquirer for sure. Congrats!
I take issue with the premise that high lead bumps must be bad just because nVidia switched to eutectic bumps on the newer 9400M.
As Jmendes inferred earlier, high lead was commonly used for years before ROHS. Compared to eutectic, high lead is a more compliant material (meaning less stress on chip interconnects) and is less prone to electromigration (meaning better ability to retain its current capacity). The most authoritative explanation on this whole subject that I have seen is Pkgg Engr's comment to Part 1 of Charlie's 'Why Nvidia's chips are defective' series.
It is quite possible that the much higher performing 9600M requires such properties, and thus the reason nVidia stuck to high lead.
So this leads us to the underfill. There is no evidence that I can see that the combination of the new underfill with the old high lead bumps is prone to premature failure. The article infers that this must be the case because the nVidia chose eutectic bumps in the newer 9400m and because MacBooks have an overheating problem. This is simply speculation. I'm not saying it's not possible but the evidence is not yet there.
Don't get me wrong, Charlie. I do not favour either point of view on this whole affair. In fact I appreciate your previous work on uncovering and explaining the high failure rate of earlier chips, and find no reason to dispute it. However, in this case, I find your conclusion premature.
I must also respond to the comment about this being a 'witch hunt'. Who cares? The motivation behind an investigation is irrelevant as long as the truth is told.
No one realized this when Apple announced the use of nVidia GPUs?
Duhh! This isn't news at all! lol
nVidia is the suck.
Liars and cowards.
<3
Surely the bottom line is actual failure rates. Do we have any reliable evidence to suggest that these are high for the parts Charlie is speaking about? They could make bumps out of blancmange for all I care as long as they work.
Just wanted to comment on your work done here, simply astounding. Real journalism, taken to the next level.
Allow me to add my praise and admiration to the chorus. I thought this type of detective work was dead and gone. I am absolutely gob-smacked at your tenacity and knowledge. Well done Sir - you deserve an extra turkey leg this Yuletide. Keep 'em coming.
Charlie, can you look into the suspiciously high failure rates for desktop 8600/8800/9600 series ? Had to rma a board to XFX not long ago, and came across forums like this one:
http://www.bjorn3d.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=54
Where apparently my videocard's cause of death is quite common.
To be frank this article epitomises bad science; that science that uses scientific methods to investigate "something" without regard to make sure that the particular "something" they're investigating is the right one
See http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10119277-64.html
"When you build a device, it's the material properties and everything in combination that leads to the robustness of the design. What we call the 'material set.' It's a combination of the underfill (a kind of a glue that helps hold the chip down) and the bump together that creates that stability in that connection,"
"What we did was, we just simply went to a more robust underfill. Stopped using that (previous) underfill, kept using high-lead bumps, but we changed the underfill. And now we don't see the problem."
"Intel has shipped hundreds of millions of chipsets that use the same material-set combo. We're using virtually the same materials that Intel uses in its chipsets,"
What you have shown is that the bumps on the 9400 and 9600 are different. Even if the PR guy said that they were supposed to be the same, but they are not, that alone doesn't mean that this difference could lead to failure. It's a plausible theory, but I don't see the cause-and effect link or smoking gun here. I certainly agree that it is very difficult or impossible to prove conclusively, unless you have an actual sample of a failure, and of course NVidia won't provide that to you. Maybe if you ask them nice...
I've been doing VLSI design for over 20 years, have worked at IBM, Intel, TI, etc. Your focus on just to Pb bumps is flawed, it is the entire material set used in the connections as NVIDIA indicates.
If you were standing in front of a engineering postmortum team right now (who specialize in this area), they would most likely shoot you down for being incomplete and misleading.
Why don't you send your article to IEEE for publication. First it would have to pass the scrutiny of engineering experts in this area. As with a postmortem investigation, I would expect they would decline to publish your article.
Keep trying though... :-)
Anand think so at anandtech in his Jasper article:
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3472
"Traditionally GPUs had used high-lead bumps between the GPU die and the chip package, these bumps can carry a lot of current but are quite rigid, and rigid materials tend to break in a high stress environment. Unlike the bumps between the GPU package and a motherboard (or video card PCB), the solder bumps between a GPU die and the GPU package are connecting two different materials, each with its own rate of thermal expansion. The GPU die itself gets hotter much quicker than the GPU package, which puts additional stress on the bumps themselves. The type of stress also mattered, while simply maintaining high temperatures for a period of time provided one sort of stress, power cycling the GPUs provided a different one entirely - one that eventually resulted in these bumps, and the GPU as a whole, failing.
The GPU failures ended up being most pronounced in notebooks because of the usage model. With notebooks the number of times you turn them on and off in a day is much greater than a desktop, which puts a unique type of thermal stress on the aforementioned solder bumps, causing the sorts of failures that plagued NVIDIA GPUs.
In 2005, ATI switched from high-lead bumps (90% lead, 10% tin) to eutectic bumps (37% lead, 63% tin). These eutectic bumps can't carry as much current as high-lead bumps, they have a lower melting point but most importantly, they are not as rigid as high-lead bumps. So in those high stress situations caused by many power cycles, they don't crack, and thus you don't get the same GPU failure rates in notebooks as you do with NVIDIA hardware."
As NVIDIA have pointed out, it's the entire material properties (solder and glue) in combination that leads to the robustness in the design. The glue (underfill) and the solder together create the stability of the connection. They've used a more robust underfill to fix the problem; as a result they don't see the problem occurring any more. An analogy: imagine if your roofing felt keeps tearing off your roof in high winds. You replace it with the same type of felt but next time use a stronger glue to keep it on. Problem solved, by using a stronger glue not by using a different type of roofing felt. In your testing process you've only tested the felt and not tested the new stronger glue that's been used.
Thanks for the heads up Charlie.
I was just about to buy a MacBook when I read this.
Went with a 24" Imac with ATI card instead.
After already having 2 x 8800 cards go tits-up I've had enough of the green monster for a while.
Hey Tony,
Nvidia has stated that they are using both manufacturing material sets until the older "unreliable" one is depleted.
"NVIDIA will transition from using high-lead solder (95%Pb/5%Sn) to eutectic solder (63%Sn/37%Pb) flip-chip bump material for the G92 product family. During the transition period NVIDIA will be supplying both high-lead and eutectic bump until inventory is depleted. No other materials are being changed."
Last sentence here is pretty important "NO OTHER MATERIALS ARE BEING CHANGED." So I were to take it, the underfill has NOT changed.
Great work!
To:
posted by : Jack Wester, 10 December 2008
Charlie let me handle this one for you.
Jack,
A great piece of advice is don't post what you think. You come across stupid. Evidence was clearly submitted and you say it's lies with no proof that this article does that. You- nothing to show and all talk.
You only look like a stupid republican moron by posting your fan boi remarks and opinion which was a worthless waste of everyone's time. Go crawl back in a hole and come out when you have something to show this article is false.
Very cool that you have access to the resources to perform such analysis. I understand that stress tests are going a bit far (thats something nVidia probably already did) but I would like to see some hard data (MTBF etc.) that the new kind of balls/package perform differently (not necessarily less reliable) before jumping to qualitative conclusions like 'bad' or 'good'.
Hey, just to let you know the problem with the bad bumps, isn't about how many hours you have played games/video etiditing etc...
Due to the bad bumps + thermal cycling (computer on/off) results in cracking of the bump contacts hence giving unpredictable outcomes depending on which bumps were affected.
I suggest you read more about this problem. Your brand new Macbook (or pro, any nvidia based chipset/graphics chipset) will only develop this problem after a year of usage depending on the user's habit (how many on/off, hubernate, sleep cycles they do in a day).
I for one was affected with a a Hp DV6000 and a XPS M1530 waiting for trouble.
My suggestion, if it's not too late to return it, do so.
I currently have the late 2008 MBP and have had some issues with mine. I know the time that you have had the machine may affect performance, however I have had mine for 1 week and have had it give me the black screen of death 3 times when playing games (All using the 9600m). I took it to my local apple store and was basically told, nothing we can do about it, hopefully they patch your game to increase the fan speed. Quite disturbing.
Warbear, if the machine is faulty then get your money back. Give them absolute hell, you will get your money back.
The product is unfit for the purpose it was sold for. Get your money back.
Warbear, are apple stores denying there is a problem with these notebooks? Is apple part of the nvidia coverup scandal?
Nvidia-gate!
Charlie, you rock. Keep up the excellent work.
Thank you for your concern. I will call apple care asap and see what they have to say about it. I also noticed that they recently released an update to the OS that has "graphics improvements". I'm going to play more games today and see if it crashes on me again.
I think Anand missed physics class, lead is a softer and is more malleable than tin.
Looking at the images though i noticed the metal seems to have not melted properly, the mixture does not seem homogeneous. And it looks like there is pitting or trapped gases in the metal. I think that they are just not heating it properly, and maybe the environment needs to be controlled better
http://www.flipchips.com/apnotes/kyzen/Kyzenevaporative.pdf
That is an article that talks about high lead bumps.
2.53 gHz, 9600m GT, 4GB RAM, etc
Purchased around December 12 '08
Fired up Oblivion the first time and cranked the settings, ran beautifully. Went to show my friends - CRASH. BKSOD EVERY TIME SINCE. Investigated and some posters suggested heat, so I checked the bottom...OUCH. Searching around I found this article and a few others. I've never read much Inquirer, but the namesake doesn't inspire confidence, however, Charlie's claims seem to match my experience. Also, the forums are FULL of this for the new MBPs.
Note: I'm fast becoming an Apple fanboi, but now with this, I'm so confused! Somebody hold me.
what news on the 17" unibody MBP's ???
UPDATE on the ISSUE.
I have bought a 2.4Ghz Unibody Macbook Pro in January, and I have experienced the Black screen of death; along with some half black screen + horizontal lines freezes.
These freezes happened in both WinXP SP3 (via Bootcamp), and Mac OS X 10.5.6 playing iTunes/Quicktime or just with the screen saver being turned on.
The freezes have happened under windows using the 9600M GT card (it's the one being used by default under bootcamp); and under Mac OS X using the 9400M. (not even playing games; but as I said.. it happened while watching movies..)
So, to me ... this MacBook Pro is cursed; both graphic cards have issues. Euthectic/Non-euthectic, well.... good work TheInquirer. However, it's been MONTHS now, and Apple has still not released any statement/fixes for this.
I am so upset; because they won't replace the computer here in France. Apple Care told me to bring the computer to an authorized repair center... but of course, that way I am forced to 1. find a way to get there 2. wait a week with no machine
I have also tried spinning up the fans, using smcFanControl; and this does not have any impact on this macbookpro.
The machine is running cold and it still freaking dies.
I have also replaced the drivers in BootCamp (graphics, nForce, Audio... etc) as you have described here: in vain.
Just thought I'd post my experience.
This article gives a whole new meaning to "Computer Forensics" and I tend to agree with its findings. However, if Apple had developed a better architecture, the heat would not have become an issue. Just look at Toshiba's new Qosmios. They look like gigantic ships. Apple likes it this way though: smart and so f****** hot.
My mbp gpu is dead dead dead and " invidia" is replacing it though you have to take it into an apple store for the repair. So is apple paying the bill or inviria??? Anyways last mac I ever buy. For what you pay apple should be on top of this and not sell mbp that could have possible failures. I've only had the mbp for a year. When I get it back I think I'll buy one of those bs laptop coolers. Btw you could grill some good food with the heat mbp puts out maybe that's all it's really good for now LOL. Thankfully I've got an iPhone that drops calls to help me stay connected while I wait for the next three to four days for apple to replace my logic board with another possible bad gpu. :) thank you Steve Jobs FTW
"Note
In a statement just before publication, Nvidia's Mike Hara had the following comment on the situation. "The GeForce 9600 GPU in the MacBook Pro does not have bad bumps. The material set (combination of underfill and bump) that is being used is similar to the material set that has been shipped in 100s of millions of chipsets by the world's largest semiconductor company.""
Intel?!?
My screen went black immediately after updating to OS X 10.5.7 which includes the firmware update that claims to have fixed the black screen problem... This is not a new update... I wait so I can give them time to resolve these issues... but i should have researched it first!
Apple Genius claims there is nothing wrong with the NVIDIA graphics card, and through a process of elimination deduced the logic board must be replaced AT MY COST, because by coincidence it went out at the same time of the update... me and hundreds of others, as evidenced by the complaints in the apple forums. I wonder why Apple encourages so many of these "replace the logic board" solutions? Doesn't that suggest that there is something faulty with Apple's logic boards, failing in less than 2 years? But I thought it was the NVIDIA chips affected? One tech source suggested that it was the NVIDIA chip that caused the logic board failure, though appearing unaffected itself.
If it is only a small percentage of people affected, Apple should be happy to admit a small fault. That seems to be their strategy: accepting only a small amount of cases strangely similar to a much larger group...
I am looking forward to the day that the price of computers is appropriate for their lack of durability.
Has no one tested the durability of the motherboard? It doesn't sound like an nVidia problem. Try testing the motherboard, or better yet try testing the Intel chipset on the board.
Blaming nVidia is stupid.
You can see the problems in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9959108&tstart=0#9959108