Apple, Dell and HP owners sue Nvidia
APPLE, DELL and HP notebook owners have combined their lawsuits against Nvidia in an attempt to force the graphics chip maker to replace its dodgy chips.
According to CIO, the case, for which the plaintiffs have applied for class action status, could involve millions of computer owners who have suffered at the hands of Nvidia.
Nvidia admitted to the problem in July 2008, when it said some older chipsets that had shipped in "significant quantities" of notebooks were flawed.
Later it blamed its suppliers, manufacturers and even consumers and said it would take a $196 million charge to pay for replacing the graphics processors.
Apple claimed it had been misled and said it was told that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, when Apple carried out its own investigation it discovered that some of the dodgy chips had ended up under the bonnets of its shiny MacBook Pro notebooks.
HP and Dell first issued BIOS updates designed by Nvidia that boosted fan speed. The increased fan speed was intended to ward off chip failure.
However the plaintiffs in the combined lawsuit said that anything other than replacement of the flawed chips was an insufficient remedy. Anything less made the computers less viable, resulted in decreased battery life and just delayed inevitable failures until the machines had outlived their warrantees, they claimed. µ
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You pay something, it gets broken then you pay another one, brand new. And the cycle goes on.
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. So if you buy a new car, you drive it off the lot, and it stops working the following week... or maybe it works, but you can never shut it off... you'd just buy another car, right?
There is an expectation that when you buy something, you aren't buying something faulty or already broken. Misrepresenting that the products are fine when clearly they are not is fraud, and there are laws against this behavior. Hence the lawsuit.
So Charlie was right about nvidia's bump issue then. It's nice to know that the inq has cutting, yet truthful, reporting where other tech news outlets just let things be.
I have had 2 8800gt's fail because of this. usually takes 3 weeks to get a new one, luckly I had an n6600 laying around...
After 2 laptop mainboard replacements of my own laptop and 100% failure rate on laptops in our office I'm not getting any laptop with nV hardware again.
At least the extended warranty meant the laptops got fixed on-site; if we'd paid for 1 year back-2-base warranty the crap would have really hit the fan!
Great products and drivers but too much hassle.
1. Both Nv and the OEMs are to blame for this.
2. OEMs are at fault for doing the BARE and I stress this, bare minimum for cooling these things
3. Nv is at fault not for the bump material but for designing a hot chip and then coming up with a cooling solution that is barely good enough.
4. This is pure speculation, but I believe Nv designed a cooling system with roound heatpipes, OEMS use flat heat pipes to cool everything. Not sure if anyone has ever notice, but the laptops with the chips in question are not thin and have planty of room for round pipes.
5. Charlie gets nothing right, he is a tool with no brain cells. The man wouldn't know 2+2 if he had Albert Einstien to help him.
Nvidia owes me another laptop motherboard for a failed graphics processor, now my new one will occasionally find the wireless NIC. Guess I can't complain that after repairing the laptop I only spent $20 for the entire thing....
FYI its a HP Pavilion dv6000.
So it seems that Charlie was right (again). Big surprise there. Too bad that people still don't get that after the fact. I wonder how many of those that complain about Charlie's other articles are people who are paid to say such things?
My DV9000t has the round heatpipes and still failed. I do all my own laptop work and discovered this. However the largest issue (aside from the failing nvidia GPU chip) was that once I opened the unit up the heatpipe/heatsink was only mated 2/3 of the way to the chip. After replacing the motherboard with my own f-ing cash I was able to properly mate the heatsink to the GPU chip with a little bending and some quality Artic Silver 5 and my temps for the new GPU are far better than before. So yes there is some OEM vendor issues in the mix here.
You should give Charlie a break on this issue though, he was pretty much right on all his assumptions for this particular issue.
Having not seen or had to work on that model yet, ty for the info, but all the ones I have seen have flat heatpipes. What in the world are the OEMs thinking here, Flat heatpipes dont allow for very much cooling as it realies heavily on heat transfer thru the copper itself instead of allowing for proper good movement of air thru it.
Correction to your post: Nv's cooling was not 'barely good enough, it was insufficient!
And, OEMs are not to blame if they implemented the bare minimim Nv cooling requirements. The 'bare minimum' should be good enough. If it wasn't good enough, it shouldn't be the bare minimum!
I still blame hp, they were fully aware of the nvidia defect before my laptop dv9548us was manufactured. It has been sent back to hp twice already for free "repairs" which they are still bilking unwitting consumers for up to 400 dollars for. This so called repair is the replacement of the motherboard and subsequent gpu unit (in this case the 8600gsm) with the exact same model of motherboard and even better yet the same series of gpu and out of the same lot of what I am sure is probably a nifty pile of spare defective gpu's.
Each time I get it back from repairs the gpu is still UNderclocked by 30%, the fan runs all the time, and pop a movie in and in a few minutes the gpu core temp is at 90 degrees celcius and rising. I will continue to send it in for free repairs until I've done it four times, that seems to be the magic number for a new replacement of the laptop. I've seen it happen so at least there is hope. If you want to learn more of how this happened and how hp is dealing with it, I suggest you go to hplies.com or google "nvidia defect".
When OEMS bought these parts I'm sure contracts were signed that should have specified specific specifications for installing the chips. Apparently the OEMs followed these specs or else nVidia would be able to wipe their hands of this issue. Plus, the fact that these chips are failing for everyone really makes it look like nVidia is at fault. But to be fair, this could have happened to ATI too. The competition between the two companies is fierce and they take risks, unfortunately this one burned nVidia really bad.
I had two hp dv9000 and had the issue. One was in warranty and one was not. HP fixed both for no charge. Still it was a pain and nV should pay. I could see it if it was one manufacturer, they all seem to be affected in one way or another though. Could they all have undersized the cooling? Also the fan speed increase was silly for them to do.
Nvidia already set aside $196 MILLION dollars to reimburse OEM for the bad chip issue. But I notice OEM are still only doing the bare mininum. New laptop generally come with 1 yr warranty and if people complain to their seller(HP, IBM, Dell, Sony, Apple etc) If OEM were doing the right thing, they would have fixed the gpu on them unless they keep sending out bad gpu back to the customer like what Microsoft did with the XBOX 360. The OEM would have been reimburse from the cash set aside by Nvidia. So are OEM not handling this right? Generally as a rule of thumb, I would test a product right after I bought it.. If I don't like it or something is wrong, I just return it to the seller. I have only use the RMA on 1 GPU (9800gtx++ in all my life of gaming on PC. It was quick and simple. I card I got back, I stress tested it for 2-3 weeks before okaying it.