Nvidia Sued by Laptop Owners Over Faulty Chips
Apple, Dell, and HP laptop owners are tag-teaming Nvidia with a combined lawsuit stemming from issues with faulty GPUs
While Nvidia’s technology may have moved on from the GeForce G84 and G86 fiasco, owners of that chip certainly haven’t.
In fact, five laptop owners who have the older, faulty GeForce hardware are now banding together to sue Nvidia, reported ComputerWorld.
According to court documents, the plaintiffs are seeking from Nvidia full replacement of the faulty chips and to pay unspecified damages.
Rather than recall faulty notebooks, manufacturers of laptops affected have gone through certain steps to help cover the problem. Apple promised owners of the GeForce 8600M GT-equipped that it would repair for free any faulty GPUs within two years of purchase date, regardless of extended Apple Care coverage.
Other notebook makers such as HP and Dell also extended warranties and released new BIOS software that increased the fan speed to better cool the GPU – hopefully warding off any defects from showing up.
Such measures were unsatisfactory for many, especially the five who are now suing Nvidia.
"This is a grossly inadequate 'remedy,' as it results in additional manifest defects, including, without limitation, further degraded battery life, system performance and increased noise in the Class Computers," the legal complaint read.
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"Worse, this 'remedy' fails to solve the actual problem. Instead, this measure only ensures that the Class Computers will fail after the OEM's express warranty period expires, potentially leaving consumers with a defective computer and no immediate recourse," the lawsuit continued. "Finally, even after this purported 'update,' video and system performance is still degraded due to unacceptably high heat and part failures.
The plaintiffs are spread out in Louisiana, California, Illinois, New Jersey and New Mexico. Although among them are only laptops made by Apple, Dell and HP, if such a suit were to hold any water and move to class action status, it could be spread owners of other notebook makes. Stay tuned.
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dman3k Apple has problems?? OMG OMG! Has hell frozen over??Reply
Let me call Master Steve Jobs to make sure. -
megamanx00 Hah, funnyReply
Oh well that's what happens. The problem is so bad there are people on ebay just specializing in replacing and repairing the affected HP laptop motherboards. You see some of the boards repaired and resold, which isn't bad since you can pick up a system that just needs one of those new boards pretty cheap. Of course then there is the pain of taking it appart ^_^, but that's what I did to build my cheap DV6000 latop. -
My Asus G1S laptop died two weeks ago. I did some video editing, put it to sleep, and when i came back, nothing. My 8600gt is dead and to replace it out of warranty would be "A couple hundred dollars" as quoted from tech support. I just want them to replace a faulty and recalled card that they knew would burn out. We need a class action lawsuit, this looks to be just 5 people.Reply
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Tindytim TeddersUh, Guys, Dell and HP have the same issues. Not Apple's fault.So it's Microsoft's fault Nvidia wrote crappy drivers for Vista that caused quite a few issues, but Apple making a bad hardware choice isn't there fault?Reply
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ill b ben ahh.... my good old 8600m gs... wich stoped working after 1.5 year or so.. good thing i write a lot of e-mails wich made me get a brand new!!.. crappy motherboard with the same 8600m gs again so again its a matter of time.. Ans yeah it is nvidia fault since they decide what the materials are for the gpu it self. not to forget my 8600 gts wich also stoped working after the same period of time.. i learnd my lessons back to atiReply