14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia has made interesting statements regarding its G84/G86 faulty chips. The graphics cards manufacturer initially announced that only some of its chips experienced problems, and that HP was the only vendor that received them. The company looks to be untruthful, as Dell seems to have unofficially admitted to experience the same problems with ten models it got from Nvidia.
Some of the previous pieces of news rumored Nvidia's entire G84/G86 lines of graphics cards to be faulty, yet the manufacturer denied the affirmations, sustaining that only a few of its mobile cards are subject to failure at a certain point. It seems that the story might get messier, since Dell came up with the same issue, but Nvidia does not want to admit it.
Different people have been served with different stories by the company, but none of them came close to the truth. Although the Santa Clara company announced to have set aside $200 million for warranty, repair, return and replacement of the faulty graphics chips, it just looks like it does not want to spend all the money.
Dell found quite an honorable way to deal with this problem. Seeing that the graphics problems that appeared due to the weak die/packaging material used for the GeForce GPUs, the vendor took the issue into its own hands and came up with a few BIOS updates to fix it. The Inspiron 1420, Latitude D630, D630c, Precision M2300, Vostro Notebook 1310, 1400, 1510, 1710, XPS M1330 and M1530 notebook models will benefit from the new BIOS releases.
Basically, the new BIOS updates are able to modify the fan profiles, which allows for a better regulation of the GPU temperature fluctuations. That also means that the graphics cards have smaller chances to get to EOL. Dell also said that users who had already experienced problems with their cards should contact the company.