All NVIDIA G84 and G86 chips are faulty

[Amd Athlon]

Electronista reports that all of NVIDIA's G84 and G86 chipsets used in GeForce 8400M and 8600M graphics cards, not just a select batch, are suffering from heat-related failures due to an unidentified substrate or bumping material used to help make the video hardware. They all share the same application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), which is the source of the problems, in both notebook and desktop PCs. The chips have been failing since last year, and earlier this month, NVIDIA said the problems will drop the value of its shares to the tune of 25 percent, and is budgeting $200 million for repairs. This is the chip used in Core 2 Duo (Santa Rosa) MacBook Pro models, which often require a logic board replacement when the chip fails.

According to the Inquirer's report, NVIDIA itself is officially keeping quiet about the specifics related to the problems, sticking to a story about a batch of now-discontinued parts that used a different and faulty bonding process. The report goes on to say the problem causes failures sooner when the number of heat cycles increases, which is why laptops equipped with the affected parts are seemingly failing at higher rates. NVIDIA is accused of knowing about the problem for well over a year and not taking any effective actions to address it. The fix NVIDIA is providing to users is a driver that will keep the fans of PCs on to help manage the thermal issue, which NVIDIA claims only affects HP products, although Dell & ASUS PCs are known to be affected, as well as MacBook Pros.

[Filiberto]

This are the notebook graphics chips which are meant to provide a higher support in the gaming on notebooks. There is an significant amount" of defective notebook graphics processors. It was found that all G84 and G86 processors for both laptops and desktops, are defective. This causes bad performance over the chipset and needed to be fixed. So just have a look before purchase.