Nvidia Reports Large Quantities of Defective Notebook Chips

[ajkula66 Guru]

I certainly hope that all you guys and gals have long warranties remaining on your T61/p units with nVidia cards...

Because if history has taught us anything when it comes to ThinkPads, it is that even if the design or component is known to be defective, the repairs will only be made under warranty...T4x GPU problem, anyone?

Good luck to all, from the bottom of my heart, seriously. 

[carthikv12]

That's a very good point though I think the difference has been exagerated...After about an hour of very high settings gaming with trackmania my T61p hit 86C in a hot room(34 C)... later in an AC room it was only around 76C... I guess we can say they'r hitting 80C at peak gaming (in 25C room temp) and only while gaming do the affected dells and hp's hit 100+C I've heard of 115's also... So I guess we can mark that as our difference. Not 61C Vs 100C. It's about 80C Vs 100C. This is still a very big diff in temps that's in our favor! The idle temps seem to be a bit more similar for some reason - my thinkpad has stabilized at a lowest of 49C to a highest of 57C in about a 24-27C room temp... 

For me, It hit 61C while watching video and just after I started the comp. I guess the cpu temp influences the gpu at start or maybe gpu is under some load by processes in the background? 2 days ago after watching movies it stabilized at 49-50C! and yesterday was between 54-57C but it spiked to 66C and 68C for a little while for no apparent reason... just guessing background stuff again. I guess there's no point in analayzing the temps so closely... but i'm just a paranoid geek!

Message Edited by carthikv12 on 08-04-2008 10:01 PM

[wjli2]

thank god i have unloaded my T61p to the lab.

[limonetti]

The simple central request remains unanswered: Which series are affected, and which are not? Dell shared this information, HP did, and here we are just asked to trust in Lenovos superiour cooling solutions. 

[carthikv12]

yea exactly... i think it's high time lenovo gives us the info. with the new w series, there's no risk of them losing sales of systems with potentially affected systems anyway. 

even nvidia has said too little regarding this issue... it sucks!

[limonetti]

Well, carthikv12, I don't think they are just lazily trying to sit that out. Lets assume there are somewhere lots of items with quadros rotating from the fridge to extensive 3D-gaming twenty times a day, providing data for enhanced thermal stress analysis.

 

Starting up from the baseline after 6 months of illness buying additional warranty is not an option for me and so I'm trustfully looking forward to being supported in:

a) .... how to avoid extensive thermal stress and

b) .... where to purchase affordable CRU and FRU parts in maybe one, two or three years

As a sudden crashdown in certain situations were a katastrophe I also wish some kind of softwaretool indicating the first signs of this fault. Actually each little unexpected GUI behavior during presentations causes panic, even if it's just one of these well known driver related bugs, or some halt on harddrive writing ...

Message Edited by limonetti on 08-15-2008 09:51 AM

[carthikv12]

good point limonetti but the thing is hp knew about the defects last year! they said it themselves so they must've began testing a while ago... and yea it'd be really helpful if they could help us out and tell us how to avoid the damage. I'm gonna keep my fan running for a while... it helped keep the temps really low and more importantly stable yesterday!

[wuyun]

I've just met the problem with my laptop T61.

It was bought last summer, and it just passed its 1 year warrenty.

The problem started from 2 days ago. It came without any difference before this problem happened. And next time after I start my laptop, only 4 digit color and 800*600 resolution display on the screen. It is terrible!

I tried a lot of ways to figure out the problem. And finally, only when I disabled the graphic card which is "nVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M" I can get the normal resolution with 16or 32 digit display profile, but the speed is really slow and not running smothly.

I searched for the solution online, and finally find this place.

In this problem, I find the solution which seems lenovo will repair this for free.

But I'm still worried that my T61 just pased the 1 year warrenty, will lenovo still fix it for me for free.

I treated my T61 really well and it should never give me any problem. However, this problem does not come from me, it is from the defective product of the graphic card. So I think it is reasonable for lenovo to take care of it.

Any suggestions?

Message Edited by wuyun on 08-22-2008 12:51 PM

[Mark_Lenovo Administrator]

Wuyun,

Welecome to the forum. 

Let's not jump to conclusions here....

I understand that there has been a lot of publicity recently associated with nVidia chips, and your GPU may or may not be failing - it could be any number of components in the subsystem, and may not even be hardware.   The fact that you can get a working display, and change graphic modes leads me to believe your hardware hasn't necessarily gone bad.   Let's try to do a bit of debugging first....

Where are you going to "disable" the video card?   What OS are you running and what version of video drivers are you running?   What kind of things were going on with the system the day before?  Any new software, updates, etc?

If you right click on the desktop and choose prefrerences, then the settings tab, what is listed for your display, and what are the settings, resolution, etc?

Please send me a PM with your model and serial number so we can check warranty status and see what else we can do to help.

Mark 

Message Edited by Mark_Lenovo on 08-22-2008 01:57 PM

[wuyun]

Thank you Mark.

My problem has just been solved.

My solution is completely uninstall the driver for the for this graphic card, and install it again and reboot. And everything seems fine now.

Previously, I just reinstalled the driver and tried to use that to replace the old one, but it didn't work. And I thought it was broken.

I really love my T61.   Good lenovo!