WARNING: Do not Try this at home (Nvidia demo = both M17x gpus burnt)

Hello guys, I thought I'd warn M17x owners about what happened to me so you don't have to cry about it later ( as I did lol)


The story begins with me bored and going to nvidia's website to check it out and finding a "cool stuff" section well this cool stuff was more like very HOT stuff for my gpus

I went to the downloadable demos section and pressed the "SCAN NOW" button to check which demos would run on my GPU. I got a message telling me: "Unable to detect your hardware at this time".

So I thought: "well let me download some, the worst thing that can happen is they don't run or maybe run too slow" ( stupid me!)

I downloaded the:"Human Head Geforce 8800 Ultra" demo and I was surprised that it run realtime, the 3d head is amazing and I thought wow Nextgen games are gonna rock my world. Being a 3d modeler/animator I was really impressed with that pretty realistic model being displayed (rendered) in realtime, calculating highres textures, hdri images for lighting and reflections and a highres model all that instantly not like the renders I'm used to work on that need several minutes per frame. I was stunned and called a colleague to show him this demo he came to my desk and we were both amazed for a about 10 seconds when a smoke/burnt component started to fill the air and then: BOOM! the system shut down.

I then thought wow it got hot and shut down to stop potential damage but guess what? it never turned on again. I called Support since I was still on warranty and told them I was using the machine ( did not say exactly what I was using it on just in case) and it shut it self down. The symptoms of my system ( the power adapters blue light turned off everytime I connected it to the laptop, made them think it was a short in the MB so they sent me a new one. The technichal support guy changed it and noticed the MB gpu was fried. tried turning it on and it did not work so checked the GTX 260M and it also smelled like burnt and asked for a gpu replacement. After a week or so I got the GTX 260M replaced and everything was fine again. So I have to Thank Dell for the great service and warn you guys.



check it out online to see how cool the demo looks lol but DO NOT DOWNLOAD/TEST on your laptop....

NVIDIA Cool Stuff

Do not try out Nvidias demos at least on M17x R1 laptops, Hope this helps


Joe

 

You had a faulty card/mobo. I run their demos all the time without issues.

 

No issues here with 'Human Head' or any of the other demos.

 

Nice of you to link it as well

 

If it was not my fault but the mobo's then I don't feel guilty about not telling Dell I tried the demo even though the site was "unable to detect" my hardware. And maybe it was good to test them while I was still on warranty lol

So I guess the warning goes to people out of their warranty time limit since they'll have to pay for the new MB and Gpu....

 

Yep, not your fault. In fact, you should run the same demos on your replacement parts to make sure that the same does not happen. If it does, then something still isn't right (perhaps a poor ground or faulty power adapter feeding too many volts).

 

Things like this do happen a bit often when you build systems for a living. I've had many video cards start smoking like that once we start the stress testing. Just something failed and we send it back for a new one.

 

Yeap you're right I should test the new parts but I don't want to abuse of my luck. My warranty is about to expire and if for any reason they don't want to fix my system again I will have a pretty expensive and useless piece of plastic lol. Everything else ( included gaming and 3d rendering for my work stuff) is working great so I think I'll just don't try any demos again on this one hehe.

 

This is why you should stress it as much as possible.

 

Will these demo's play on an ATI based system?

 

Most of the tech demos from ATI or NVidia only play on their respective chipsets. Sometimes people write wrappers for specific demos to play on the alternate chipset, but due to the wrapper there's also usually a noticeable performance hit.

 

That is a shame. The human head one looks amazing on my desktop, would have liked to see it on the RGB LED screen.