Yesterday, NVidia acknowledged to have dedicated 150 to 200 millions UDS to cover problems and issues that could appear with some batch of notebook GPUs. It seems to be a defect in a material which will prevent GPU to properly manage increases of temperature. When solicited, the GPU will heat more than usual and the defect material will make the internal overheating protection aiming to switch-off the GPU to preserve it ineffective. As a consequence, notebook owners featuring such defective GPU could experience some non recoverable failure of their graphic unit if they use it intensively enough to make the GPU warming up over the limit. As cooling system in notebooks are designed to only start at the last minute to save battery life, one way to prevent destroying such GPU would then be to modify the firmware to maintain its temperature below the critical limit. NVidia would be working with its partner to get it done. Of course, this will increase the noise as well as reducing the battery life span of the note
