Nvidia Reports Problem With Laptop Chips

IDG News Service ^ | July 3, 2008 | Agam Shah

[HAL9000]

Excerpt -

Nvidia has uncovered a problem with some older graphics chips that shipped in "significant quantities" of laptop PCs, the company said Wednesday.

Nvidia hasn't determined the exact cause of the problem but said it relates to a packaging material used with some of its chips, as well as the thermal design of some laptops. Modern processors generate considerable amounts of heat.

To tackle the problem, the company is releasing a software driver that will cause system fans to start operating sooner and reduce the "thermal stress" on the chips. The driver has been provided to laptop makers directly, said Derek Perez, an Nvidia spokesman.

~ snip ~

[aft_lizard]

nVidia, what has happened to you? First the huge driver problems causing 30% of reported Vista crashes, now this? Sheesh.

[NonValueAdded]

Let the Class Action commence!!!

[clamper1797]

The design culture at Nvidiot sucks ... sweat shop metality

[HAL9000]

I'd bet that they failed to anticipate the increasing complexity of Internet graphics, especially processor-intensive formats like Adobe Flash. Whenever I open a web page with Flash graphics, my computer becomes noticeably louder and hotter.

I've ordered a quieter computer.

[aft_lizard]

True that. And also to add to that, although being a big supporter of Vista, that nVidia may not have anticipated the demand that Aero would have on GPU’s as well, Aero really isnt laptop friendly as far as power demands go. On my laptop I turn aero off to add battery life even though mostly I just run Firefox and office apps.

[rahbert]

I wonder if these heat problems occur running Linux
distros (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, etc...)?

I can’t try it (no laptop).

[aft_lizard]

My guess would be yes as it is a driver issue, it probably just occurs at a smaller rate due to the nature of most linux distro’s not being graphic intensive on their desktop like Vista, however the internet is the internet no matter what OS it is on.

[fremont_steve]

Well - according to the article - the problem is related to packaging. That means that the company didn’t do a good job of the thermal design on the package. So all the driver does is turn up the cooling faster.

In my experience, this type of thing shows up as flakey devices. You’ll be happily using your machine and it’ll lock up or the video would get strange. Point being that you would have to heat the unit up to see the failure, and it would take time for it to develop - perhaps months or years.

[Excellence]

I have had to keep my notebook sandwiched between two Blue Ice weekenders to keep it cool, but only since winter ended. I do watch video from Hulu often. But it is a 3 year old Toshiba. Should I download the driver?

[John Williams]

Heat, packaging and battery life are three reasons why most laptops often come with onboard graphics chips embedded onto the motherboards themselves. The only problem is that these onboard systems are often inferior in performance compared to systems using dedicated graphics cards scaled to fit within a laptop application.

I like nVidia’s current lineup of graphics cards and it’d be a downright shame to see them screw it all up.