Dud Nvidia GPUs tip up in Dell laptops

Not just HP, then...

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

28th July 2008 15:55 GMT

Dell says ten laptop models have been sucker-punched by the GPU problems affecting Nvidia chipsets.

The company said on Friday that Dell laptops including Inspiron, Latitude and XPS models, could suffer glitches from a weak die/packaging material set that may fail with graphic processing unit (GPU) temperature fluctuations.

Nvidia had claimed earlier this month that the fault was limited to Hewlett-Packard laptops – Dell’s announcement late last week shows it is more widespread.

On 2 July, Nvidia said it planned “to take a one-time charge from $150m to $200m against cost of revenue for the second quarter to cover anticipated warranty, repair, return, replacement and other costs and expenses, arising from a weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems”.

GPUs affected produce intermittent symptoms during early stages of failure, said Dell, including multiple images, random characters and lines on the screen, and no video.

The PC vendor advised customers to flash their system BIOS to help reduce the likelihood of GPU issues, but added that anyone already experiencing temperature fluctuations should contact Dell direct for support.

Nvidia was not immediately available for comment. ®