nVidia GPU failure imminent/occuring?

I have a Precision M4300 using the Quadro 360m GPU. The screen sometimes will corrupt and start flashing like a strobe, however it then stops and all goes back to normal within about 5 seconds. This happens maybe once an hour or so, however on some reboots it happens a lot - but by rebooting the machine it seems to fix it. I've been using the same graphics driver for a year (I won't switch it due to the compatibility and complexity of my video setup as well as for ISV driver reasons). Previously I have NEVER had this problem and in addition nothing has changed hardware or driver wise on this machine in a long time. I am thinking this may be the culmination of the problem with defective batches of G86 and G84 chips in laptops?

Has anyone else had a failure of a Geforce 8 series (or possibly other) chips in their Dell, and if so what were the symptoms?

 

Does the same behavior happen with an external LCD? If so, then it's the GPU. If not, then it's the LCD.

 

The M4300 uses the defective GPU. I'm surprised that it has kept going this long but see here for details of Dell's warranty enhancement.

John

 

Yup, sounds like it's bad GPU. Dell orders waaaaay too big batches of stuff at the same time.

 

More a case of nVidia making and selling a lot of those chips before the problem was identified, acknowledged and fixed.

John

 

Nvidia did a recall.. if Dell decided not to replace their GPU to not cause any delays, than that is a different story.

 

Tell me more about the recall. AFAIK nVidia made a financial provision for the replacement of defective chips but this left the companies selling the computers having to carry the cost of doing the repairs / replacements.

John

 

Yes it did. But, it shows that Dell (well Foxcon) did not return to Nvidia their batch of GPU (the GPU's before it got installed on the motherboard) to Nvidia, to get Nvidia new fixed GPU's. Well you know what, it's maybe Foxcon fault and not Dell, which would sound about right.