Nvidia Spent $43.6 Million on dodgy chips

Nick,

Keep your day job and leave the NV bashing to me. You can't have it....it's all mine, mine, my precious.

Charlie

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/409/1051409/nvidia-k-filing-goes-microscope#comment_new_56988here

I believe this shall sum up all that I've said.

..Good one ^^

bash 'em good!

Of the amount Microsoft "put aside" for Xbox360 failures...

Can't wait to see if Anand is right about the NVidia Ion platform having issues with BD playback... Check out his blog.

NVidia == Ncompetent

A lot of people just bought new laptops instead of getting the old ones fixed. I wonder how many bought another faulty nVidia chip...

"so obviously a lot of people didn't bring them back"

They weren't as faulty as previously stated.

Chalie, bad new here. If you hoped that nVidia would go bankrupcy for this issue, well we are far away from this.

They spent only a fourth of what they put aside...

Had an HP DV9000. 9 months into ownership its nvidiot chipset died. Had it replaced under warranty.
After 6 months the new/repaired chipset died again.
Got a mobo off ebay (used) worked for 3 days, died again.
All this on a desktop replacement laptop that never left home doing simple stuff like surfing and 2d games.

Not all the company's would fix the bad chips if you had one. I had to replace 90% of a bad Gateway because the video (6150LE) went bad on it and it was a BTX part so had to convert everything over to ATX format.

"INTEL wanna-be Nvidia "

made me lol

Yeah, I was just saying, "What happened to Charlie?" Taking a break? I never thought it would happen.

I imagine that some people decided to suck-it-up on broken parts to avoid paperwork and some of them never actually experienced a failure during that period.

At least Nvidia forked over the cash; they did what they had to do in light of allowing the use of inappropriate manufacturing materials in the fab process. This seems to be an issue that both GPU manufacturers that are using the TSMC fabrication facilities. I read reports that TSMC is not switching to manufacturing materials that are better suited to the smaller size processes ie 65nm to 55nm to 45nm etc. This causes all sorts of issues with the fabs.

Hopefully the AMD's foundry spin off will give TSMC some good competition, being a win for customers in general.

You do know that ATi is and has been the graphics chip inside the 360... right?

Now, on the original Xbox, it was Nvidia.

I was one of the first buyers of the Dell XPS M1330 notebook. It never worked ok, and all of the problems (bluescreens) it had were due to NVIDIA chip.

The mobo got exchanged after a couple of month, problems continued (because the exchanged mobo was old stock). The exchanged mobo after hundreds of blue screens (luckily) died displaying strange things on screen (due to a broken NVIDA chip) and got exchanged again, this time with a newer version of the mobo.

Bloody NVIDA has cost me a lot in lost productivity. In hindsight I just should have thrown the notebook in the next trash bin and get a new notebook - just without NVIDA.

So they set aside $196 million, but only needed to spend $43.6 million on bad chips.

Sounds like a great day for NVIDIA ... must be why Charlie couldn't bring himself to write the article

The reason they didn't spend all that money. Customers were not notified in writing of the crappy chips. Reason is Nvidia did not take responsibility for their actions. It could have been this or maybe it was the other persons fault etc etc. It's understandable why warranties are for 1 year or unless you pay for the extra, forcing the price of the machine to go up. A lot of people just sucked it in. I haven't met too many people that read tech news, which is another reason. That's what they pay me for.

i bought a 8800gts back in march of 08 and then barely used my desktop till recently, after 2 weeks of gaming, i bought fear 2, it went bad on me, i never knew the desktop chips were bad as well back then :( as for all the nvidia bashing comments, i used to love nvidia, but this is unacceptable, im out 200 bucks and now im buying a 4870 and will never buy nvidia again unless i really have to, sigh........

The implication you're making is completely invalid.

By the same logic, I could make an argument that I received a faulty Intel chip (P35 MCP). It ran hot, it caused system crashes as a result of said heat, and prevented me from installing a second pair of 2gb RAM modules. Ergo, the chip must be faulty and Intel is to blame.

The problem was in the god-awful heatsink Gigabyte decided to provide. It was basically a lump of aluminium with a few notches carved into it and a Gigabyte sticker on top. A quick switch to a Thermalright "tower"-type solution and I'm overvolting it by 0.2v with all 4 DRAM slots in use and stability is rock solid.

ATI didn't cause the 360 issues - Microsoft's decision to use a completely inadequate cooling setup did. Almost any chip would have failed in the same circumstances.

Silly nVidia; you guys need to stop making chips that overheat and melt the solder.

Sincerely,
The XBOX 360 Engineering Team

Nvidia did not make the GPU in the Xbox 360.

Are you ignorant to look in manuals (or even the interwebz lolz) that it's a custom made ATi GPU.

Yes Mark, I know it wasn't ATi that caused the problem. My point is that the Nvidia GPU in the original Xbox caused the most errors. Sure the RRoD is a bad thing on the 360, but the original Xbox had more errors from the Nvidia GPU.

I.E. the GSoD.

Actually, the ATI designed chip inside the 360 was built and inadequately cooled by good ol MS.

ATI did nothing but provide an excellent design.

You nvidia fans sound utterly absurd in your defence of a company that has treated you and all their other customers with contempt!

Nothing wrong with nv performance but the company won't be getting my money anymore!

The worst part about it, is laptop makers like DELL etc are STILL selling these f*cked up chips!
I have been looking at laptops for a few weeks now, and decided to get a Sony FW31ZJ as it has an ATI 3650 in it.
Don't get me wrong, I wanted the Dell M1530, but the nVidia 8600M put me off.
I'm NOT going to buy something for £1400 that I *KNOW* will break when I use it.
These companies are as bad, if not WORSE, than nVidia in my opinion.

I do know that Nick.

It's like Nintendo with their God Damn disk drive. It's absolute shit.

http://i41.tinypic.com/16arxxx.png

I just sent my laptop into HP for repairs yesterday due to graphic hardware failure. It has an nVidia 8600M GS chip, which is going bad. I'm hoping they upgrade me to a Radeon, or at least something not 8xxx, but I'm not holding my breath.