Dell will offer limited warranty enhancement to all affected customers worldwide on Nvidia die packaging issue. This announcement follows the BIOS updates releases that is trying to reduce the heat throttle. Until now only HP has announced similar actions. There are no announcement from other companies on this issue although many MacBook owners seem to face the same issue. Since Dell and HP have announced the models affected there is no doubt that series of G84 and G86 GPUs are affected but the affected list might include also the G92 and G94 GPUs as an increasing number of posts regarding issues generated by graphic cards that feature those cores have been noticed lately.

Dell has released  during the last month BIOS updates to prevent NVIDIA GPU failure issue for 10 notebook models. The issue is a weak die/packaging material set, which may fail due to GPU temperature fluctuations.

The affected models are:

• Inspiron 1420
• Latitude D630
• Latitude D630c
• Dell Precision M2300
• Vostro Notebook 1310
• Vostro Notebook 1400
• Vostro Notebook 1510
• Vostro Notebook 1710
• XPS 1330
• XPS 1530

If the GPU is failing, an unlucky owner of one of these notebooks that features a Nvidia GPU may experience some of these symptoms during early stages of failure :

• Multiple images
• Random characters on the screen
• Lines on the screen
• No video

Dell recommends the owners to update their system BIOS.  It is good to see at last somebody acting on this issue, even if their solution is just to update the fan management to have it started at a lower temperature on a reduced speed.  This will reduce the probability of failure or just postpone it.  It does not solve the real problem as the issue is hardware.  You can imagine that owners are not really happy with this as they do not want to postpone a possible failure so their notebook could crash after the warranty expire term. They would rather prefer it to have it fixed within the warranty period.

In the mean time Nvidia, the one that is to blame in this case, is announcing the new era  of notebook PC gaming, featuring advanced rendering and physics effects that will transform gaming beyond what consumers know today.  This evolution is a new generation of notebook PCs equipped with NVIDIA’s newest GeForce® 9800M and 9700M GPUs and featuring NVIDIA’s PhysX™ physics engine.  I guess we really needed a new era as this one is kind of faulty.