Nvidia pays out on faulty cards

tommybhoy · 15 Jan 2014 at 23:50

Nvidia pays out on faulty cards.

Nvidia has agreed to pay any Canadian who had the misfortune to buy a certain laptop computer made by Apple, Compaq, Dell, HP, or Sony between November 2005 and February 2010. Apparently these models contained a dodgy graphics card which was not fixed for five years.

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/33542-nvidia-pays-out-on-faulty-cards

http://www.canadiannvidiasettlement.com/Home.aspx?case=nvidia&ln=EN

Orangey · 16 Jan 2014 at 00:59

Canada only? I've got a bumpgate that just died!

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 09:10

Why Canada only? I've got a an absolute shed load of Lattitude D830s with naffed GPUs that need reflowing...

MooMoo444 · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:16

Perhaps it would simply be too expensive to cover everywhere.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:32

Favouritism. Disgusting

.

Everyone knows full well there are only 12 people in Canada

Make · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:37

235 views and no-one has posted anything about AMD not having the same problem etc..

I am disappointed at GC.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:39

It's a slow news day and almost the end of the week, people don't have the energy

That and most people who know anything about anything will openly admit that some of Nvidia's elder mobile chips had problems. I've lost count of the number of them I've had to reflow / replace MB on D and E series Latitudes.

But AMD GPUS still suck

OLDPHART · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:43

MjFrosty said:
Favouritism. Disgusting .

Everyone knows full well there are only 12 people in Canada

+1 Europe has always been treat like second class citizens, l wonder if you got a large group of people with the faulty cards as one voice and take it up with Nvidia and get a paper involved >The Register.

I got then involved when OCZ would not give me a refund over having a faulty SSD and 3 replacements failed as well, l sharp got a full refund.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 10:59

Oh, again...you're making me feel like I've done the rounds. The number of Vertex 2 I sent back for RMA is definitely high in the twin digit department lol.

Marine-RX179 · 16 Jan 2014 at 11:10

Would be nice to get refund for my faulty 9800GTX+. No chance of that happening I think

Steampunk · 16 Jan 2014 at 11:14

Nvidia are only paying out for Canada, because that's where the courts have forced them too. They are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 11:23

We know, well I do. I was just jesting

drunkenmaster · 16 Jan 2014 at 11:38

As steampunk said AFAIK a bunch of people(retailers/oem's or consumers I don't know) smacked Nvidia with a class action suit, hence the Class action mentioned everywhere all over it.

Nvidia have paid out pretty big to several OEM's who were replacing laptops quite some time ago, they gave Sony 150mil or something and some others.

Thing is, your average laptop user doesn't have a clue who Nvidia is, and when their laptops died shortly after the warranty went kaput, they went and bought a new laptop rather than going "hey, I wonder why this died".

If people sued Nvidia in every region they'd be pretty much paying through the teeth for every failed Nvidia gpu they made for 5 years. Even though I can't stand the way Nvidia does business, I wouldn't have been arsed to bring about a class action lawsuit against them if my laptop had died, that's life.

I'd be very surprised if MANY companies didn't have similarly faulty products out there costing end users 100's of millions across the globe that just don't get specifically found out.

The Xbox issue cost them a lot more than it cost Nvidia, because MS is a much more public company, most people didn't know what the cpu, gpu or hard drive was in their Xbox, but they knew their MS Xbox failed, other peoples Xbox's were failing and MS had to be fairly public about it. When Sony laptops failed, Sony took the blame for the most part and same with the other OEM's.

If for instance it was Shield's or Tegra tablets that failed in the same way Nvidia would have taken a crapload of bad publicity and had to refund/replace stuff to the level MS had to with the Xbox, but they were fairly shielded from responsibility from most average users on this problem.

ubersonic · 16 Jan 2014 at 11:55

I wonder how much of it is actually Nvidia's fault and how much is the OEM's.

I.E one of the laptops mentioned is the Dell XPS 1730 which had a reputation for cooking its SLI GTX 8800m's because dell didn't give it enough cooling, the was actually a petition for a new BIOS with better fan profiles but Dell ignored it. Aside from the few customers who managed to get an Alienware as a warranty replacement Dell must be feeling quite good about this having basically got off scot free and left Nvidia holding the bag

drunkenmaster · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:00

One of Nvidia's "fixes" for their bumpgate problem which had a problem with temperature cycling in particular(ie the smallest delta between load/idle the better, 20c idle 50c load less likely to fail than 20c idle 70c load). But gpu's are designed to run that hot, and a laptop is designed for a certain amount of noise. Nvidia asked OEM's to update laptops with far higher fan noise to help "fix" their problem of faulty bump materials.

OEM gets specs for thermal design of chips from Nvidia, build a laptop with appropriate noise/specs, after all their parts start failing Nvidia want them to basically change all shipped products into high noise devices customers don't want to avoid Nvidia parts failing because they aren't up to spec.

OEM's aren't at fault, Nvidia are, could Dell in that case have curbed the problems, very possibly, but in potentially limiting Nvidia's problem, they would have effectively changed the laptops for customers. Loads of people complained that Nvidia's fix was making their laptops much louder and worse to use.

Steampunk · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:07

ubersonic said:
I wonder how much of it is actually Nvidia's fault and how much is the OEM's.

I.E one of the laptops mentioned is the Dell XPS 1730 which had a reputation for cooking its SLI GTX 8800m's because dell didn't give it enough cooling, the was actually a petition for a new BIOS with better fan profiles but Dell ignored it. Aside from the few customers who managed to get an Alienware as a warranty replacement Dell must be feeling quite good about this having basically got off scot free and left Nvidia holding the bag

The problem was Nvidia's. They used a material in the construction of the chip that wasn't specced for the heat it would have to take. Effectively it took the chip outside of the specified and agreed to thermal requirements that Nvidia had set for the PC manufacturers.

Extra fan speed (which some manufacturers implemented) was just meant to get the chip past the warranty period, where it would then fail. This also had the effect of making laptops noisier and draining their batteries faster, so maybe this is why Dell wasn't willing to mess about with fan speeds that didn't fix the root cause.

ubersonic · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:15

drunkenmaster said:
OEM's aren't at fault, Nvidia are

It's debatable in some cases, as a former XPS 1730 owner I can tell you we all held Dell responsible over Nvidia and rightly so, we literally begged them for years to release a BIOS update to give us higher fan speeds or manual control so our laptops could be sufficiently cooled, and it was their incompitence that resulted in that situation, they should have known that a pair of 8800m's would need more cooling than the single 6800go in the old XPS. Still at least it wasn't as bad as their XPS 1340 debacle (the aesthetic hinge on the screen caused it to block the fan exhaust lmao).

I must say though Dell have improved a lot since those days, the fans in my Precision M6600 are much better than the asthmatic jokes in the XPS 17" units.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:17

drunkenmaster said:
As steampunk said AFAIK a bunch of people(retailers/oem's or consumers I don't know) smacked Nvidia with a class action suit, hence the Class action mentioned everywhere all over it.

Nvidia have paid out pretty big to several OEM's who were replacing laptops quite some time ago, they gave Sony 150mil or something and some others.

Thing is, your average laptop user doesn't have a clue who Nvidia is, and when their laptops died shortly after the warranty went kaput, they went and bought a new laptop rather than going "hey, I wonder why this died".

If people sued Nvidia in every region they'd be pretty much paying through the teeth for every failed Nvidia gpu they made for 5 years. Even though I can't stand the way Nvidia does business, I wouldn't have been arsed to bring about a class action lawsuit against them if my laptop had died, that's life.

I'd be very surprised if MANY companies didn't have similarly faulty products out there costing end users 100's of millions across the globe that just don't get specifically found out.

The Xbox issue cost them a lot more than it cost Nvidia, because MS is a much more public company, most people didn't know what the cpu, gpu or hard drive was in their Xbox, but they knew their MS Xbox failed, other peoples Xbox's were failing and MS had to be fairly public about it. When Sony laptops failed, Sony took the blame for the most part and same with the other OEM's.

If for instance it was Shield's or Tegra tablets that failed in the same way Nvidia would have taken a crapload of bad publicity and had to refund/replace stuff to the level MS had to with the Xbox, but they were fairly shielded from responsibility from most average users on this problem.

I think if you care to delve even deeper than that, that a portion of the issues on, at least the DELLs, is the way they implement their chipsets and GPUs playing god as it were. I don't think it's entirely Nvidias fault in some instances. Not all, but some.

Steampunk · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:35

ubersonic said:
It's debatable in some cases, as a former XPS 1730 owner I can tell you we all held Dell responsible over Nvidia and rightly so, we literally begged them for years to release a BIOS update to give us higher fan speeds or manual control so our laptops could be sufficiently cooled, and it was their incompitence that resulted in that situation, they should have known that a pair of 8800m's would need more cooling than the single 6800go in the old XPS. Still at least it wasn't as bad as their XPS 1340 debacle (the aesthetic hinge on the screen caused it to block the fan exhaust lmao).

Increased fan speeds wouldn't have helped, unless they were capable of keeping the chip at exactly the same temp 24/7 for the rest of it's life. Not possible unless you were never going to power it off.

Other manufacturers did it and it might have added a few months to the life of the chip, but the problem was that any thermal cycling gradually broke the layer of the chip that joined it to the substrate.

It would be like trying to stop a patched bit of road from breaking up by keeping fans on the tarmac in the summer months, whilst still trying to let traffic drive over it. Faulty chip is faulty chip, no matter what you do to try and delay it failing.

Obviously people held Dell accountable (since that's who built and sold them the laptop), but there were the same problems with HP and other manufacturers. The manufactures held Nvidia (who don't sell to end users at all) responsible, as the fault was clearly traced to the supplied graphics chip failing under circumstances where it was supposed to work correctly.

Silent_Scone · 16 Jan 2014 at 12:55

Increasing the fan speed most definitely helps. There were a lot of chips being insufficiently cooled, and like I said previously - the way DELL implement and design some features both on board and superficially is questionable.