That $200 million isn't just paying for chips. nVidia is reimbursing its partners with that money. Think about everything that happens when a notebook is returned under warranty -- shipping both ways, tracking/inventory, labor to perform the fix (which likely involves replacing the entire graphics board or the entire motherboard, not just the GPU). If there's a lot of them Dell or HP might have to hire additional techs. nVidia is on the hook for all of that.

Also, once you decide to take the hit on something like this, you guess high. You're going to get slammed by Wall St regardless, but they really don't care if it's $100M or $200M. What they don't want to see is a $100M "one-time charge" on your quarter's books.... and then another $100M "one-time charge" the next quarter because you low-balled your estimate. Wall St loves certainty; they want to be sure the problem is contained and has a number attached to it. Problems that drag on and on are not good for your stock price. Eg, see just about every bank stock the past couple of quarters.

If its a very small percentage of notebook only chips, why take a 200 million dollar charge for it? Seems fishy.

I went to ATI after 10 years with Nvidia and life has been fine. For years, Nvidia was all hype and I got sick of it. Now their true colors are showing...

Yes, I was a hardcore, kill ATI, Nvidia fanboy for a long, long time...and now no more!

I just hope Apple goes with AAMTID for their new MacBookPro model or that I can get a new logic board for my SantaRosa MBP under an Apple repair extension program. The former would be an expensive pill to swallow for me though.

The Inquirer may be correct. Our firm has sold loads of 8600GT's - all of wich seem to have the same "affliction". The problem is less apparent on Vista and appear to affect some gaming titles more than others.

Would Nvidia fess up even if failures did occur in desktop products?

FFS, when have they ever done otherwise?? NF4 hardware firewall anyone? FX5800s cooking to death running screensavers? Need something more recent? Try G80's apparently hardware-based scaling issues. NV's hardware has had serious blemishes before, and NV has never done anything but spin rosy pictures and sweep it under the rug.

This explains why during my tenure at Dell there were a remarkable number of people calling in with system exchanges claiming it was too hot to touch. Back then it would have been valuable to know that sending another system out with practically the same video card was not necessarily going to resolve the issue. Ah well, past tense anyway.

How many chips does $150-200 million imply are affected? Because to me that doesn't seem like a small number of chips.

As for the Inq, who believes in the mentally handicapped "Charlie" ?
The guy has some serious issues, especially when it comes to NVIDIA.

the failures are actually due the C51 pcie bus getting overheated leading to bump crack.

no gpu is involved.

if anyone actually look at the diagnostics for the HP recall, all the laptop has the C51 chipset with either wlan or gpu issue.

reason C51 is prone to overheating is because the system bios does not monitor chipset temperature and the hardware fan is also not design to protect the chipset.

the quick fix that HP dished out was to set the CPU and GPU fan to kick-in early so the lower the overall system temperature. This is not a real fix.

Desktop chips are not affected because the chipset temperature in desktop is much lower.

e Inquirer reported a few days later that all of Nvidia's G84 and G86 graphics processors were in fact failure-prone—even the ones in desktop graphics cards.

Once again the Inq is full of poop.

Next they will have an in depth report on how Paris Hilton is a virgin.

I have always thought that higher end graphic cards are a gamble. But, at the at the end of day, I would still rather gamble on nVidia rather than AMD.

Hah, Nvida.

This makes me feel so much better about my new HP laptop :-(

well hopefully my vostro 1400 does not croak........I'll be pissed