RSSHP announces BIOS update, repairs for faulty Nvidia GPUs
By Tim Conneally | Published July 29, 2008, 3:10 PM
HP has announced a "Limited Warranty Service Enhancement" for many of its notebooks equipped with faulty Nvidia Geforce GPUs, including a wide range of HP Pavillion and Compaq Presario notebooks.
Like Dell's recent BIOS upgrade to correct overheating GPUs, HP announced a similar fix for its HP Pavilion dv2000, HP Pavilion dv6000, HP Pavilion dv9000, Compaq Presario V3000, and Compaq Presario V6000 series notebooks which contain contain 7-series Nvidia GPUs. This defies previous assumptions that the 8-series of Nvidia products were the faulty GPUs the company did not name in the SEC filing describing the problem.
A BIOS update for those systems is available now. In addition, HP is offering free repairs to customers with a notebook suffering from certain symptoms.
Unlike Dell, however, HP is not expressly mentioning GPU issues as the sole reason for the BIOS fix and free warranty extension. Other issues, such as those with booting and wireless network detection, are also included in the symptoms lists.
Notebooks with product numbers within the ranges on the chart are all eligible for free repair, should they behave abnormally.
HP posted this notice and released the BIOS update that added the fix several months ago. The fix runs the fan 24x7. Before, the NVIDIA chips would cook if the CPU didn't stay hot enough to trigger the cooling fan. HP didn't promote the fix nearly as much as they should have, though they did finally send out a message via HP Update several weeks ago.
This isn't just a problem with discrete NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA chipsets for HP's AMD notebooks have been cooking off. That's what's causing the wireless failures. Intel propaganda notwithstanding, AMD CPUs simply don't run hot enough for the older HP BIOS revisions to decide to start the fan. HP has wisely switched over to the much cooler running AMD Puma platform chipset on their current models.
So far my HP dv9000z has been fine but I flashed in the BIOS update right away.
You can find many threads about this issue in the HP forum at notebookreview.com. I'm a volunteer moderator there.
Score: 0
|IMO
I dont agree with the "lets put a band aid on a broken bone" approach, these companies are taking with the defective GPU's. They should just fix it.
If you bought a car, and the company found out it has a defective part, they send out a notice, you then take the car to the dealer and they replace the part.
Now, i know that cars and computers are like comparing apples to oranges. I just think they should follow the same sort of guideline.
Score: 0
|I need to see Dell as well offer a warranty extension, its only right.
Score: 0
|It's odd that HP would wait so long to make public an OLD bios update. This update had been created in 2007, While it is newer than the most public one (F3C), it is still old. This perticular bios revision was shipping on all repaired laptops despite it not being available to the public. So it should have nothing to do with the announcement from nvidia since it was created way before that. On top of that, most of the dv6xxx units run 7-series GPUs, not 8-series.
Score: 0
|"On top of that, most of the dv6xxx units run 7-series GPUs, not 8-series. "
Duh, they said that above.
Score: 0
|They edited the story to reflect that change after i had made my post. The original story said 8-series.
Score: 0
|*It's odd that HP would wait so long to make public an OLD bios update. This update had been created in 2007*
Um, i dont know what series you have but for the dv6780se the BIOS Version: F.58 A Release Date: 2008-07-08. and my laptop has the 8-series GPU.
just figured i would throw that out there.
Score: 0
|