NVIDIA meltdown in progress

[Salamok]

nVidia in denial?
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/07/16/nvidia.denies.gpu.rumor/

can still see some class action happening if they down clock all the laptops. 

[CharlieMopps]

I can agree with the above posts about the ATI HD4850
The card is incredible... got mine for $180 and it's on par with a $500 Nvidia. Some people are even finding them on sale for $150
I can't even imagine how Nvidia is going to compete with that.

The cards do run seriously hot though. And they've made them single PCI slot cards, so they do not vent out the back of the case. The result? My cards so hot, I literally can't touch it. My case temps went up 20 degrees F after installing it! I had to buy a PCI slot cooler to pull heat off of it and vent it out of my case. The card is acutally making me consider water cooling.

[Lantyssa]

I can agree with the above posts about the ATI HD4850
The card is incredible... got mine for $180 and it's on par with a $500 Nvidia. Some people are even finding them on sale for $150
I can't even imagine how Nvidia is going to compete with that.

The cards do run seriously hot though. And they've made them single PCI slot cards, so they do not vent out the back of the case. The result? My cards so hot, I literally can't touch it. My case temps went up 20 degrees F after installing it! I had to buy a PCI slot cooler to pull heat off of it and vent it out of my case. The card is acutally making me consider water cooling.

So, your $180 card will cost a lot more than $180, damages your components with extreme heat, takes more work to outfit your rig with, and requires a drastic cooling solution?

It's the fuckin' shit, man!

[Mrbloodworth]

Great, right when i jump on the 8800 bandwagon...there is this. I used ATI for years and NVER had an issue. I still have my Radion 9700 pro 128!

[TripleDES]

The overhauled 8800 chips aren't affected. It's the lesser variants that are.

Due to choice of operating system, I'm practically locked onto NVidia. Their *nix drivers are actually pretty decent. So I'm not switching unless ATi gets their act together or NVidia goes bankrupt.

If this is Linux you are talking about see here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_evolution&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_radeonhd_4870&num=1

Solaris.

[schild]

Why do I have a feeling they're going to announce that the 8800 series is flawed also. The mind reels.

[CharlieMopps]

Why do I have a feeling they're going to announce that the 8800 series is flawed also. The mind reels.

I don't know about that... there are a lot of people out there OC the heck out of 8800's... I'd think we'd have heard something by now.

[Big Gulp]

So, your $180 card will cost a lot more than $180, damages your components with extreme heat, takes more work to outfit your rig with, and requires a drastic cooling solution?

It's the fuckin' shit, man!

Nah, just get a Duo Orb and you should be fine.  Consider it adding the cooling that the card should have had to begin with.   

[CharlieMopps]

So, your $180 card will cost a lot more than $180, damages your components with extreme heat, takes more work to outfit your rig with, and requires a drastic cooling solution?

It's the fuckin' shit, man!

Nah, just get a Duo Orb and you should be fine.  Consider it adding the cooling that the card should have had to begin with.   

Anything that vents inside the case is worthless to me. I need something that exhausts out the back. I don't want to blow $200 but its looking more and more like I'm going to gave to switch to water blocks.

[Tale]

I repeat ...

My 8800 GTS 320Mb is the most stable, reliable video card I've ever owned.

... in 15 years of video cards, during 7 of which I was working for a PC magazine.

[Lantyssa]

Your honor, the defense rests.

[CharlieMopps]

I repeat ...

My 8800 GTS 320Mb is the most stable, reliable video card I've ever owned.

... in 15 years of video cards, during 7 of which I was working for a PC magazine.

No offense but... I think that would make you less qualified to provide an opinion on the subject.

[rattran]

So, now Nvidia has now officially released the 9800gt, which is a renamed 8800gt, which was a reused name from a previous card. And the 9500gt, which is a neutered 9600gt.

They're reminding me of the worst ATI naming days. Keep your numbers/names simple, confusion is not a good thing.

[Salamok]

So, your $180 card will cost a lot more than $180, damages your components with extreme heat, takes more work to outfit your rig with, and requires a drastic cooling solution?

It's the fuckin' shit, man!

Nah, just get a Duo Orb and you should be fine.  Consider it adding the cooling that the card should have had to begin with.   

Anything that vents inside the case is worthless to me. I need something that exhausts out the back. I don't want to blow $200 but its looking more and more like I'm going to gave to switch to water blocks.

seems like it would be fairly easy to build your own cowl fan combo that vented out of the slot next to the vid card... $10 for some plastic and a fan?

[Lantyssa]

At least you can save on your heating bills in winter.

[Tale]

No offense but... I think that would make you less qualified to provide an opinion on the subject.

Yeah, I didn't enjoy it, I'm no expert and my opinion is only as a consumer. Just came into contact with more video cards than usual back then.

[Trippy]

So, now Nvidia has now officially released the 9800gt, which is a renamed 8800gt, which was a reused name from a previous card. And the 9500gt, which is a neutered 9600gt.

They're reminding me of the worst ATI naming days. Keep your numbers/names simple, confusion is not a good thing.

NVIDIA did the same thing way back during the GeForce 4 days when they renamed the GeForce 2 MX the GeForce 4 MX.

[fuser]

Necroing this thread!

Bigger news the 'inq (ok take this with a salt rock),

It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/12/nvidia-g92s-g94-reportedly

Well, the G92 chip is used in the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile flavours of 8800, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants just to confuse buyers. The G94 is basically only the 9600GT.

Huzza! 

Reading this while trying to trouble shoot a friends pc with an 8800GT thats completely shutting down after a period of usage... jeeeeez

[rattran]

It's only Charlie at he Inq reporting it at this point. No reason to get your knickers in a twist over it yet.

I suspect a lot of the recent nvidia stability problems are driver related.

[Trippy]

Necroing this thread!

Bigger news the 'inq (ok take this with a salt rock),

It seems that four board partners are seeing G92 and G94 chips going bad in the field at high rates

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/08/12/nvidia-g92s-g94-reportedly

Well, the G92 chip is used in the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 8800GS, several mobile flavours of 8800, most of the 9800 suffixes, and a few 9600 variants just to confuse buyers. The G94 is basically only the 9600GT.

Huzza! 

Reading this while trying to trouble shoot a friends pc with an 8800GT thats completely shutting down after a period of usage... jeeeeez

Follow up: Nvidia 55nm parts are bad too

[Sky]

Oh look, Inq bashing nvidia 

[fuser]

So the class action lawsuit is started....

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9114399&source=rss_news50

"A lawsuit filed in a California court on Tuesday alleged Nvidia violated U.S. securities laws and concealed the existence of a serious defect in its graphics-chip line for at least eight months "in a series of false and misleading statements made to the investing public."

The lawsuit charged that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and CFO Marvin Burkett knew as early as November 2007 about a flaw that exists in the packaging used with some of the company's graphics chips that caused them to fail at unusually high rates."

Edit: note its a stockholder over the disclosure and how the stock went in the shitter because of it NVDA

[Yegolev]

Ha, that's a shitty stock alright.  Dropped about 66% from 52 weeks ago.

[Ingmar]

My mystery source tells me the mobile chip issue isn't as bad as the prior one with desktop cards. Nobody's recalled anything yet, and the Geforce 9 mobile chips aren't affected at all.

[Salamok]

Seems like all the newer model Dell laptops have switched to ATI (as opposed to mostly being nVidia 9 months ago).

[fuser]

My mystery source tells me the mobile chip issue isn't as bad as the prior one with desktop cards. Nobody's recalled anything yet, and the Geforce 9 mobile chips aren't affected at all.

Whats curious is nvidia stated(hell its filed to the SEC) they wrote off $200mil for warranty work on the mobile ones...

Edit:
SEC filing

from the filing

On July 2, 2008, NVIDIA Corporation stated that it would take a $150 million to $200 million charge against cost of revenue to cover anticipated customer warranty, repair, return, replacement and other consequential costs and expenses arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of our previous generation MCP and GPU products used in notebook systems.

[Trippy]

NVIDIA GPU problems spreading to desktop versions:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/230097/has-nvidia-problem-hit-hp-desktops.html

[Yoru]

I think this problem has recently started manifesting itself on my desktop, which I built about a year ago with a 8800GT. Most of the time when I boot, after 30-90 seconds, the display output stream will shut off (monitor says "no signal" and enters power-saving mode) and the computer itself will refuse to respond to any commands short of hitting the soft-reset switch. After one reset, it works fine until I power down, at which point the issue will generally manifest again on the next boot.

I'm guessing shipping the thing overseas helped loosen the die.

[Prospero]

My Mac Pro at work got nailed. We've had 4 others go down at work with the same problem. Any word on if they've fixed the problem, or are they still shipping fragile cards?

[Trippy]

Probably. Apple is fixing them for free even if the machine is out of warrenty, however.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377

[Morfiend]

I think this problem has recently started manifesting itself on my desktop, which I built about a year ago with a 8800GT. Most of the time when I boot, after 30-90 seconds, the display output stream will shut off (monitor says "no signal" and enters power-saving mode) and the computer itself will refuse to respond to any commands short of hitting the soft-reset switch. After one reset, it works fine until I power down, at which point the issue will generally manifest again on the next boot.

I'm guessing shipping the thing overseas helped loosen the die.

Humm, I have had this same exact problem with my 8800GTX card. I could never figure out what it was. It would just some times hang at a black screen right before it should of booted Windows. Although, it seems to happen less since I installed Vista. Before it was about 1 in 3 system starts. Now its about 1 in 10.

[Yoru]

Mine's probably 3 out of 4 or more, and I'm running Vista x64. I only boot the thing up every couple days, so I figure I can let it limp along until the card gives out, then replace it. Since the machine runs fine after a reboot, it's more of an annoyance and sign of impending doom than anything else.

[UnSub]

I think this problem has recently started manifesting itself on my desktop, which I built about a year ago with a 8800GT. Most of the time when I boot, after 30-90 seconds, the display output stream will shut off (monitor says "no signal" and enters power-saving mode) and the computer itself will refuse to respond to any commands short of hitting the soft-reset switch. After one reset, it works fine until I power down, at which point the issue will generally manifest again on the next boot.

I'm guessing shipping the thing overseas helped loosen the die.

This is pretty similar to what I get on my NVIDIA machine (there's about a 50% chance of the screen going black during my first session of a day, but all is fine after the reboot), but I've got 2x7900 cards installed. So I didn't think this chip set problem impacted on me and I just had a crappy computer.