I had the misfortune to purchase 2 HP pavillion computers in January and April 2007. The first was a dv9200, with an AMD chip, costing me £990. The second was a dv9299ea, with an Intel chip, costing me £1649.99.
The first has had 2 motherboard replacements while within the first year of warranty. It has failed again, and due to having the AMD chip, is covered by an extended warranty. I can send it back to HP to get it repaired again - but what for?! It will only fail again!
The second PC has completely failed about 6 weeks ago. I can’t even turn it on. The fault is the same as with the first - GPU failure. This computer is not covered by the extended warranty as it has the Intel chip.
HP will do nothing, so I have sought legal address, and been advised to claim for a full refund from the retailers as the computers do not meet the legal requirements of the Sale of Goods act (1979) in UK. The poor retailer will have to chase HP for their reimbursement - but at least I will legally be able to get my money back.
I will not be buying HP ever again. They have dealt with this matter atrociously, refusing to acknowledge a fault despite literally hundreds within their own forum complaining of identical issues.
And their fixes for the few ‘lucky’ ones that manage to get the extended warranty are doomed to fail again. I have researched and found that this is almost guaranteed to happen.
So my recommendation would be - avoid buying from HP. They may have the capacity to develop and sell new technology, but they seem unable to support it. And they do not respect the legal rights of consumers, for which they will unfortunately have to pay for - either in loss of customer loyalty, financial renumeration, or both.

I have a later model slimline (not covered in the HP list) with 6150SE graphics. 3 questions on increasing longevity. HP includes a worthless proprietary bay for their media drive - would mounting a small case fan in this space so air is blown out the vent holes reduce likelihood of failure? Would adding video card in the slimline PCI slot and turning off onboard video help?(This would likely increase internal temp in this little case)
I regularly turn this computer off since it's connected to audio components and I rarely use more than 3 times a week for few hours at a time. Would leaving powered up in stand by or hibernate increase or decrease the longevity?

Sounds like all he did was call McLellan a liar without actually addressing their issue... what a douche nozzle.

I never said it was underfill only, I said it was underfill, plus poor choices in bump and pad material, plus poor choices in packaging, plus poor choices in cooling, plus poor bump layouts, plus....... I did look into this for 2 months, talked to countless packaging people, and did a lot of reading.

That all said, I am not a packaging engineer, but nothing I have claimed has been directly disputed by NV, and if there are any factual errors, they don't hesitate to snipe from the gutter. This time, they didn't. Again, not conclusive proof, but pretty strong anecdotal evidence.

I think it was you that mentioned the C51m problems/report. There is an official list of bad parts, and that is on it. I am also sworn not to print it, so I won't, but your reasoning for failures, PCIX, don't really apply to the other parts listed, they are not MCPs.

Also, Apple has come out and said they directly had failures due to defective NV parts, and the parts that Apple is claiming (either G84 or G86 - I am in Tokyo after a 20 hour flight (so far) - I don't have my notes) wasn't on the list. Nor is the G92 which NV steadfastly denies is defective, but Apple directly states that it is in Radar. This many failures across this many part lines and processes says that it is more than a single bad engineering snafu.

The parts I claimed were bad early on have all (I think, the vast vast majority anyway) come up in warranty claims from HP, Dell and Apple. NV denies it, OEMs directly say they are bad, and are spending a lot of money to fix customer issues. Are they doing this out of their own good will, or do you think there is really a problem?

Call me crazy, but after following it really closely, one side seems to be habitually unable to come clean. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one that is.

-Charlie

Hey Charlie D from the Inquirer?
Cool...welcome dude :)

Neil McLellan is AMD's Packaging and Interconnect Director, so is not a stupid man. He knows something about packaging. He is probablly right about something . Every tehnological step has it's plus and minus , everyone knows that. And he was MK for Ati . What's new ?
Nvidia did something wrong ,this is clear.
Whend 3 companies like HP,Dell and Apple said Nvidia is guilty, I think Nvidia did it.
About nvidia's answer it's just PR ...
If someone lied and tries to cover it up is Nvidia.

Summary: Nvidia now is just a humble producer of GPUs. How other manufacturers ended up developing hardware around their GPUs is a complete mystery!!!

Well, I am impressed. Sounds like they have out-sourced their excuse making to India.

Tese chibz ah not fauldy!! Oh, no. Tey ah meand do fail when dey fail. And when dey work dey do tis for a greader cause and dere is no reason tobee worried! It is our way at Nweeda Corborashion of broduzing combuter chipz.

Sorry, I'm away from the office so I don't have access to IEEE database. But I encourage those who does have access please do the research yourself. Don't take my word or anybody's...

Here is something I found via google:
http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~cober/mse542/page2/files/Cornell%20...

Go to page 98. I'm pretty surprised that I'm the only person who frequent this site with some understanding of materials.

I'm speaking from personal experience, I do not work for neither Nvidia nor AMD but I worked for Neil Mclellan before. He is a fake.

It does demoralize you to see people in un-deserving positions. W is one, Neil is another.

Damage or whomever from TR it may concern:

Why is #75 still in this board again ?

It's obvious that this "guy" doesn't know how to discuss something in a civilized manner. I can take ironic comments, but I just won't go through the personal attacks thing.

End users to the AMD, IBM, INTEL and VIA :

We just buried nvidia.

whooop whooop whooooop ....

rofl

I have read things here and there about this. Never payed attention since I build my own desktops, and have no need for a laptop. NVidia has never failed me as well. Seems this issue is with a particular model of HP desktops/laptops? I wouldn't doubt it is an HP issue though. Their QC is top notch on new products but not so much on anything 6months and older. At least that is how it is in my HP blades department... :/

where did my comment go?

I'd guess the man from ATI is right

1. statement out how many devices made
2. Attack on the person whom said in the first place that "this is our take on it"
3. Failure to come clean about what really happend

What I still don't know is what exactly are the symptoms your computer displays as the GPU starts to fail.

Is it like the HP warranty said and your system won't display or boot.

Or is it a gradual thing where you start having instability such as "Your graphics device stop responding Windows must now restart" or games begin to crash kind of thing?

I own two laptops with nVidia integrated graphics that could fail and am really starting to get worried about their lifetime. Any advice about prolonging it?

So far it seems the general guideline is lower temps and don't turn it on and off to many times?

I'm sure there's a bit of truth on all sides regarding this issue but AMD needs to tread carefully here. If some of their parts fail then what would be their explanation since they use "superior" solder bumps?

Never throw stones at glass houses if you live in one too.

has delivered technology over the years that companies like ATI and Intel have benefited from.

ugh!

has delivered technology over the years from which companies like ATI and Intel have benefited.

Personally, my experience is that 3 nVidia cards that I owned, in 2-3 years time they all died. First, sometimes you turn on the pc and the image is corrupted, reboot, and ok again. Then the problem get worse and you have to reboot 3-4 times till you get the image ok again. And it keeps getting worse until in few months it does not ever boot again. The same pattern repeated in these 3 cards: TNT2, 5900FX & 6800GT. Bad luck? Coincidence?

nVidia can't be specific about who is to blame here when nVidia knows it is to blame...;) It's really that simple. When you know you've goofed up the last thing you'll do is to admit the problem was your fault to begin with since that just gives all of the percolating lawsuits a concrete target...;) It's in nVidia's advantage to keep things vague and confused at this point. The problem with not owning up to a specific problem, of course, is that it then becomes impossible to make assurances that the problem is solved--since you've already done handstands trying to convince the world that you "aren't sure" what caused the problem in the first place.

Typical big business marketspeak. Call me when they fess up, until then, I won't give them a dime.

I could probably summarize the whole statement as made by the nVidia representative in two words.

NO U

Geez, when will anybody have the balls to admit that something went wrong?

Crazy, chair-throwing Steve Ballmer managed to admit that Vista did not meet shareholder goals and is hardly getting adopted and deployed in the business sector.

Why Nvidia cannot openly admit that there were inherent problems with new materials and their chip design? It is not like the it is the first-time that they try to bury some widely-known hardware-related problem. *cough* broken Purevideo on NV40 *cough* broken hardware firewall on NF3/NF4 *cough.

OK, so the UNANSWERED ten million dollar question:

So Mr. McCain, err, McLellan: You've dodged the issue with your non-answer. You've stated that Nvidia's production means are beyond reproach.

WHY THEN are parts in the field failing at unheard-of rates? WHY is Nvidia not taking ownership of a problem which EVERYONE else emphatically lays at Nvidia's doorstep??

nVidia's response sounds like more marketing rubbish to me.

I'm willing to believe Nvidia on this. Because, companies like HP and Dell really do put the cheapest rubbish in their computers.

In the first article there are quite a few instances where the author does not quote Mr. McLellan so we have no idea what he actually said, only a brief summary that could very well be misleading.

Then in the second article, it appears that Mr. Fisher is responding to quoted comments from Mr. McLellan that we have never seen. Show me where Mr. McLellan implied that AMD's use of a power redistribution layer was unique?

The only conclusions I can draw are that the Nvidia spokesman is spewing BS, or the author is being deceptive and playing the companies off on each other or these are just examples of badly written articles. My guess is all three.

Posts nuked for potty mouth.

Somebody tell me this'll come up in this weekend's podcast...

I wish klingons were real.

Do we even know what percentage of Nvidia chips "failed" , concretely because of THIS problem and not something else?

So, I just read a bunch of "He said that and we ain't saying anything".

It took two weeks of legalese to get that?