Around the middle of November 2007 I bought a laptop directly from HP, the Pavilion DV9590ea model. At the time I thought I was getting quite a deal, especially since I used an online coupon to get a discount, paying around £1,100, for a laptop with a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 8600GS Nvidia video card. The laptop appeared solid, except that sometimes the video card would reset itself for no reason I could determine, a situation that I mistakenly attributed to a bad Vista video driver (Google ‘nvlddmkm error’ to see what I mean).
My Vista experience, apart from those resets, was quite solid, without any BSOD making an appearance unless I did something quite out of the ordinary, such as installing software not supported for Vista.
I considered the laptop to be the most powerful and stable PC that I ever owned, allowing me to do almost anything I wanted, from editing simple videos, HD media playback, terrestrial digital TV recording and playback, flawless wireless connectivity, acceptable gaming performance and many other functions. All seemed to work well, except for the occasional and inexplicable video driver reset.
As an avid reader of technology news websites, I eventually came across a story from The Enquirer, and as you will be able to see, it was quite dreadful, but I finally got an answer to my video card reset issue:
All Nvidia G84 and G86s are bad – The Enquirer: THE BURNING QUESTION on everyone’s mind is what Nvidia parts are failing in the field? …
The short story is that all the G84 and G86 parts are bad. Period. No exceptions. All of them, mobile and desktop, use the exact same ASIC, so expect them to go south in inordinate numbers as well.
Multiple analysts also told us that NV specifically told them that this problem is confined only to HP. I wonder why Dell is having failures in huge numbers for their XPS lines and replacing them with ATI parts? Why is Asus having similar problems? Go check the message boards, any notebooks that came with G84s and G86s have boards filled with dead machine problems.
If you look at the HP page, the prophylactic fix they offer is to more or less run the fan all the time. Once again, for the non-engineers out there, fan running eats a lot of power, so this destroys the battery life of notebooks.
And so it happened, the HP Update application included with my laptop eventually upgraded the BIOS, changing it to have the fan run continuously when the laptop was put under any type of stress. HP has offered an ‘Limited Warranty Service Enhancement’ for many notebooks affected by this issue, however, my model is not covered. It seems that the issue is only being partially acknowledged by Hewlett Packard, with the company offering this ‘Service Enhancement’ to AMD based laptops, according to the experiences of many individuals on the HP forums.
The issue with the NVIDIA video cards seems to be related to its ‘GPU solder joints’:
Nvidia GPU solder joints at a disadvantage over ATI, scientist says – TGdaily.com: A tiny material issue in Nvidia’s GPUs has cost Nvidia $200 million so far: The problem boils down to the solder bump material, in Nvidia’s case high-lead that was used in all of the firm’s GPUs that were produced until late July , and we still do not know how serious the issue really is. According to our sources, Nvidia has switched to eutectic solder bumps in recent weeks and there is now a new, apparently independent research report, that claims that eutectic solder bumps, which are used for example by AMD’s ATI unit, may live much longer than high-lead versions. Of course, switching to eutectic isn’t the entire solution, as the material has a much lower melting point than high-lead.
Now I’m faced with a situation where I have to send my laptop to HP since the video card finally failed on me. I was playing Red Alert 3 when the laptop completely froze on me, with the audio stuck in a loop. Ctrl-Alt-Delete would not work, forcing me to reset. I fired up the game again to see if it was just a random issue, but it happened again, however, this time after resetting the computer I had no video signal on the display. The LCD was on, but the screen was completely dark. My video card had finally died, a year and two months after I purchased my unit (yes, the warranty expired).
This is a very difficult situation. A repaired laptop would still have a defective NVIDIA video card. This puts any person affected by this situation in a position where no matter what you do (according to the information available), the hardware is guaranteed to fail. Looking at what HP has to offer, you see no ATI based laptop products (except for some old models of the HDX line). You have to go to Dell’s Studio 17 to find a product with comparable features that uses an ATI video card. It is difficult to conceive that a company like HP would do something like this, but the again, this is the same company that spied on its on executives and reporters.
I will keep updating this post as I go through the process of sending my notebook to get it ‘repaired’.
Other relevant links:
The Inquirer reports that the issues extend to the G92-G94 video processor lines
#30, I would if I were you, but this is a decision you have to make by yourself.
You might consider taking an extended warranty.