Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
2 Posts
0
11493
March 11th, 2013 23:00
Question about Dell refurbished laptop with NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135m
I just bought a Dell-refurbished Latitude D630 on dellauction.com. The auction didn't specify at the time, but it turns out that this laptop has the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M graphics. I have heard all of the horror stories that went along with these graphics a few years ago, and I have a few questions:
1. Was a list of effected serial numbers ever released for the Latitude D630? The Dell support rep I spoke with said that some D630s were affected, and some weren't.
2. Is there a way to tell if the current motherboard in the laptop is a properly soldered/repaired one? Being 2013, and given that this laptop was a business model in its previous life, I can't imagine it making it until now with the defective motherboard/GPU without it having been repaired (the laptop currently works fine, by the way).
Any help or insight that can be provided on this matter would be appreciated.
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
March 12th, 2013 05:00
Basically, all these nVidia chips are faulty - there are no good ones. nVidia never redesigned the chip - which would have been necessary to fix the problem.
If you can return the system for a refund, do so - otherwise, when the board fails, replace it with an Intel-video version of the board. These are reliable.
slavrenz
2 Posts
0
March 12th, 2013 06:00
ejn63,
Thanks for the reply. Perhaps I am misunderstanding the original issue then. I thought that the problem was that the GPUs would become separated from the motherboards, due to inferior solder exacerbated by excessive heat due to the design of the chips. However, I was under the impression that for the later motherboard replacements done by Dell under warranty, they used an improved solder that prevented the issue from recurring. Is this not the case?
I guess I go back to my second question - how could this notebook, manufactured in 2007 and clearly used quite heavily for business use, have survived all the way until now unless this issue was remedied?
Also, return is not an option unless there is a problem with it, less I have to pay a 15% restocking fee. That's my quandary - I got this laptop for less than $150, and it's in generally good shape otherwise. The GPU is currently working just fine.
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
March 12th, 2013 07:00
No, the problem was with the internal design of the chips, which used a material insufficiently resistant to thermal cycling - it has nothing to do with how the chips were mounted on system boards. Though nVidia claimed to have fixed the problem, the chips were never redesigned, which most engineering analyses indicated would be needed to truly fix the problem.
Not all these chips have failed - not all will fail. A significant percentage of them HAVE failed, so I suspect those that have survived are likely to be OK, at least for a while. As with a model of car with known problems (say, for example, Chrysler vehicles with automatic transmissions from the 90s), though the failure rate is astronomical, some buyers will never experience problems, for whatever reason.