14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia's M84 and M86 cards turned into a great disaster after all. A lot of consumers were affected by the weak die/packaging material that resulted into the GPUs failing at a certain point. The Santa Clara announced a few weeks ago that it had set aside $200 million to handle the situation, but that might not be enough. Some are even wondering whether the company will be able to get the problem resolved.
Since the faulty chips were shipped to more than one laptop manufacturer/vendor, the situation went from bad to worse as a variety of mobile PC models were built with the graphics cards in questions. And OEMs are unhappy with the way things are evolving. And to make it even worse, from the millions of notebooks and laptops that are using these chips, Nvidia will only deal with 33 thousand.
It seems that customers are the ones who will suffer most. Considering that the OEM/vendor is able to fix the problem under warranty, some users will need to get $600 out of their pockets to have it dealt with properly. Strange situations may occur when users discover that their machines do not work properly due to a faulty GPU.
According to the news site Fudzilla, one customer received his laptop unrepaired from the company, with the simple explanation that, while the CPU and motherboard are working properly, the 8600 GPU is bad and that it is not covered by warranty. The customer had to choose between buying a new laptop and replacing the faulty 8600 GPU with a new one at the price of $600. He chose to replace the chip, and also had a bit of luck, as it was on a removable module.
Things will not stop here for sure, and all the costs involved in the replacement of the chips will be on someone's bill. The system vendors will try to avoid paying for this, no doubt about it. Another certain fact is that there are a lot of users who own notebooks packing such chips and wonder whether they are defective or not.
The one that could benefit from the situation is AMD. The company is expected to take advantage of Nvidia's misfortune and pick up additional design wins for its upcoming two new product series.