14 DAY TRIAL // Last Friday we reported that all of NVIDIA's G84 and G86 chips were believed to be faulty. Our piece came in the aftermath of NVIDIA's announcement regarding the fact that a number of its previous generation chips had been found to be defective. The fast-spreading news had a serious impact on the company's shares, which suffered a 25% drop after word got out in the media.
In the already mentioned article, we explained how all of the G84 and G86 parts were suspected to fail at a certain point for the exact same reason: the same ASIC was used on all of the chips, desktop cards included. And, although NVIDIA refused to make any comment on the suspected issue, it did blame the suppliers for it. Even so, users that have had the unpleasant surprise of dealing with one of these chips expect NVIDIA to come up with solutions to the problem and not with accusations.
According to a recent post on the ArsTechnica website, the Santa Clara-based graphics manufacturer has denied the rumors according to which all its graphics chips are faulty. As a matter of fact, NVIDIA is downright saying that none of the GPUs were suspected of having entered the same batch as the other chips, rumored to be defective. The company is also stating that it intends to stay by its customers, and to repair any and all notebooks that experience the announced field failures.
According to NVIDIA, "the issue is limited to a few notebook chips only; we have not seen and don't expect to see this issue on any NVIDIA-based desktop systems." The company also added that "only a very small percentage of the notebook chips that have shipped are potentially affected, and the problem depends on a combination of environmental conditions, configuration, and usage model."
Even if NVIDIA is now refuting these accusations, chances are it won't make things any better, especially as the green company recently had to deal with a number of other issues as well.