Friday, August 29,2008 @ 3:40pm
NVIDIA's GeForce 9 also hit by failures?
NVIDIA's widely publicized video chip failures may also touch on the most recent GeForce 9 series as well as older models, if data leaked to The Inquirer are authentic. The documents allege that NVIDIA has ordered a change in conductor material to fix the problem not only for GeForce 8 cards made on a 65 nanometer process, such as the 8800 GT, but also many cards using the newer 55 nanometer technique for the same chips; this would expand the failures to include most GeForce 9 series parts
The company has already made its component switch and should be shipping functional cards but also notes in the memo that it will continue shipping cards built with the older material until supplies run out. The move is estimated to leave many of the potentially defective cards on sale until some cards based on the platform are drained entirely.
Consequences of the slow changeover could be particularly dire with claimed failure rates as high as the "teens" for the 8800 GT and higher still for the 9600 GT, according to the claim.
NVIDIA has publicly maintained that the issue is limited to a handful of notebook processors but has been caught understating the nature of the issue in the past, at first saying only HP was affected but was ultimately forced to recognize the issue affecting Dell notebook owners.