Dell extends warranty for Nvidia-equipped laptops
By Jonathan Schlaffer
That shiny new XPS M1530 or M1330 available from Dell may be equipped with a defective nvidia graphics chip. If you are a new customer looking to get those (and other) Dell laptops, or an existing customer consider any issue arising from that covered.
Nvidia still hasn’t exactly been clear on which nvidia chips are affected by a certain “weak die” issue. But, it does appear that Dell and HP are by far the companies affected by this the most.
Temperature changes are most likely to cause some 8400M, 8600M, 8800M and presumably the 9xxx variants (due to a similar manufacturing process) to fail early.
Nvidia likes to say “fail earlier than expected” which is just a way of saying “we put out a crappy product but aren’t standing behind it.” Some manufacturers did release a driver update that changed how often and how long the GPU fan activated to keep the chip cooler.
Dell has taken an additional step by extending warranty coverage for 12 months. Which only applies if you experience a GPU-related failure.
Service from Dell aside (which does not impress me) then you are pretty much covered if it decides to fail within the new warranty. If it fails at the 12-month and one day mark, well, how about buying something with a chip that won’t fail. Say, maybe an ATI AMD Radeon.
The following laptops are covered by the extended warranty,
Dell Precision M4300
Dell Precision M65
Latitude D820
Latitude D830
Latitude D620
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Entry was posted
on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
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