Sony Offering Support for Faulty Nvidia GPUs
It's about time.
While HP, Dell and Apple have already admitted that its products are victims of the Nvidia GPU packaging issue, it took Sony a little longer to step up for its Vaio customers.
Earlier this month Sony finally issued an official statement (see here for image of statement) regarding its laptops that feature the faulty GPUs. It reads as follows:
In July 2008, Nvidia publicly acknowledged a failure associated with some of their graphics processors (GPU) due to a manufacturing defect in the graphics chip packaging. At that time Sony and Nvidia jointly investigated whether Vaio models equipped with this GPU were impacted by the issue. This investigation revealed that the issue had not occurred in such Vaio models.
However, after closely monitoring the situation, Sony has now determined that a very small percentage of computers with the Nvidia graphics chips may be affected.
These PCs may exhibit distorted video, random characters or a blank screen due to failure of the Nvidia graphics chips.
As part of our commitment to quality, for any customer who requires repair of their Vaio due to the Nvidia graphics processor issue, Sony will cover the cost of repair (parts and labor) at no charge during the first four years following the date of purchase of the models in question (see list below).
In case your model is shown in the list below, we invite you to contact Vaio support to arrange service for your Vaio.
- VGN-FZ11x, VGN-FZ18x, VGN-FZ21x, VGN-FZ31x, VGN-FZ38x,
- VGN-AR11x, VGN-AR21x, VGN-AR31x,
- VGN-C1Zx, VGN-C2Zx,
- VGC-LM1xx, VGC-LM2xx,
- VGC-LT1xx, VGC-LT2xx.
Nvidia recently revealed that the faulty GPU cost its business $119.1 million in the last quarter. Were you affected by the Nvidia faulty GPU flaw? If so, and it was a Vaio, at least now you're covered!

You can pay all the money in the world to fix your mistake, but you can't buy back the customer's trust. Just feels like they should take extra steps to prevent stuff like this from happening.
Their own forums are teeming with upset users and dedicated sites such as HPLies.com have been set up to highlight HP's terrible customer support on the issue. I am one of the many thousands with an expensive paperwieght. Thanks HP.
At least Dell, Apple and Sony are fixing all laptops with the defective chip.
I seriously hope you're being sarcastic. That was Sony's excuse for not offering any support until now.
Will Sony refund their money like what Apple has been doing? Dell & HP are definitely doing their best so that their customers get the world's worst service ever.
-ND
nvidia has had more issues then there letting on about - iv seen far too many 8400, 8500 and 8600's come back through my shop fronts aswell as too many 9800GTX+'s to want to even concider buying one of there products
in the past i have not been the biggest ATi fan but now the next choice in video card will more then likely be ATi - i dont want to find out my card will last only a short time and not be covered by a manufacturers fault
nvidia - ill pass thankyou
actually if you were up to speed on ANYTHING the aforementioned companies are doing with gpu's it makes TONS of sense to get a decent gpu in ANY product you buy. here's a list of examples to help squish your ignorance.
1)nvidia tegra and ion platforms - simply put great video accelleration, both high def and below, making mobile devices play the kind of content they wouldn't normally be able to play, also saving power while doing so.
2)windows 7 & gpgpu capabilities - The massive parallelism that gpu's employ make for great little processors and now software engineers are employing gpu's in their bag of tricks to make most functions you do quicker. as this applies to the next gen of windows and current gens of ubuntu alone (it makes things look pretty AND run fast) something cpu's alone can't do.
3)saves money, TONS OF IT - GPGPU applications are saving, quite literally, millions of dollars and precious TIME. Next time a woman in your life goes in for a breast exam ask about the details. Rather than rendering images of the breast (after squishing the crap out of it) on multi million dollar super computers utilizing only cpu's and taking upwards of 2-4 weeks to get the results back, they can now do so on a 5000 dollar multi-gpu "gaming" machine in around 45 minutes. THIS is where innovation in the public sector drives life saving innovation in the health industry.
4)television - you think those decoders and displays would look so great if it wern't for discerning people that buy high end rendering & display devices? I think not. Some of the biggest industries left still in america (and the world) stem from what gpu's push in the tech sector, if not directly than indirectly. Raising our standards for what your hard earned cash can get you performance wise.
In short, things like this apply to your every day life and conveniences that were once not there are there now. So next time you open your ignorant mouth and say that crap hole graphics solutions are a good thing, think twice and consider that it took some 1.7 million hours of rendering for movies that you enjoy such as cars and transformers. (those are just including the frames they did use). Granted nvidia did make a mistake wit some of their 8xxx series graphics solutions, but this is in direct correlation to ROHS standards and they are not the only company that had problems getting new types of solder to adhere to boards. Dell/asus had a huge headache with their manufacturing process when switching over and that news comes directly from an industry insider, or to me more precise the man that makes all of the communications between dell and asus and handles the accounts.
In this case, ignorance is not bliss. ignorance is your headache when your cpu performance and battery life drops because you chose a graphics chip that can't perform up to standards.
It's impossible to prevent such things 100%..On the contrary, I feel more confident when buying from a manufacturer that admits his rare mistakes and fix them for the customers
At least they're still repairing...HP isn't repairing laptops anymore for the most part unless one takes it up to the CEO. Pretty sad really.
This wasn't some cost cutting measure from Sony to screw customers over. Sony had Nvidia preemptively test the affected models of the GPU chips in question and Nvidia found no problems. It wasn't until very recently that Sony started getting customer complaints about this issue so they decided to reinvestigate the issue.
for all of you who have been affected by this: do you NOT realize how badly nvidia has f***ed us over? they will NOT fix the problem, simply replace the chip with ANOTHER faulty chip that will simply fail again. this process will continue until your warranty expires and you are left with essentially having paid the OEM money to not get any working product in return.
this is an absolute consumer outrage. if you've been affected by this problem i suggest you boycott all nvidia products. don't believe the pretty face nvidia and the OEMs try to put on the issue. they aren't fixing the problem and they likely never will.
As it may be certain companies fixing (or not fixing) the problem, your assumption that it was done to save money is incorrect. the problem is new materials that are being worked with in the industry now. ati, via, and intel could very well have had the same problem, and likely did. it's just that when you bottle up a hot gpu in a system with almost no airflow comes the problem. If your system has good airflow and if you would have updated the firmware you'd likely still have a nicely working laptop. and yes Dell did release a firmware fix, they were the first of the 'major manufacturers' to do so. On the other hand, you also have third party tweak tools that would have fixed the problem as well. Don't get me wrong, i'm not saying it's not a bad thing here, but it only arose due to lack of cooling, and nvidia really has nothing to do with that unless you bought an nvidia branded card, not a 3rd party manufactured card. There are pleanty of systems that have the affected GPU's in them, that are working just fine because the air flow is properly adjusted. But you don't hear about those because people won't state their opinions in unison unless to complain. The short of what i'm getting at... the mfg's of particular cards had underwhelming cooling solutions, hence why it's mostly affecting laptops. If you don't believe me then go ahead and do the research.