Faulty nVidia cards, what should i do?

http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/31/figuring-out-which-nvidia-gpus-are-defective-its-a-lot/3#comments

I have an FE790 with the GeForce 7600 and the card just went dead, spent 2 weeks in a shop trying to reapair it but it didnt work.

So what should i do? i bought it two years ago, so i dont have the warranty.

Should Nvidia cover the costs? should i call sony?

 

A Compaq laptop I bought two years ago with Nvidia 6150 graphics got very hot in normal conditions, I always thought it was the CPU and it died earlier this year. I found out that HP will fix the affected machines for free and I sent it to them for a free repair, they extended the warranty from two years of purchase so I just barely got in.

I should get it back this Friday at the latest.

I hope Sony does the same. On an unrelated note, there is a widespread problem with the PS3's Blu-Ray drive breaking, happened to me and sadly, Sony hasn't acknowledged this problem yet like Microsoft did with their Xbox 360 problems. I hope Sony fesses up and fixes the consoles for free. For those outside the warranty, they charge $150 for a problem that is their fault.

 

That is why I bought a 360... ok, it wasn't it was for Halo 3.

 

Hm...not to get into a debate over this, but the Blu-Ray problem isn't NEARLY as widespread as the 360's "Red Ring of Death" problem. However, I do agree, Sony should still fix the issue for free. Nintendo has also had this problem with some Wiis, and they do fix them for free.

 

I've always been a Playstation fanboy and when my PS3 broke, I bought a 360, something I thought I never would. My PS2 also suffered from disc read error problems and I hear the first Playstation 1's also had poor disc drives.

I can put up with all the negative PR the PS3 has faced, it losing exclusives, having inferior multiplatform ports, etc. but not poor build quality, luckily I bought my new Falcon 360, free of RROD. If my 360 breaks as well, I'm going back to PC gaming.

I'm lucky I bought my Playstation 2's from Costco where I could return them over a year after purchase when they broke, or I sadly would have gone to Xbox, when PS2 had the best games.

When PS4 comes out, I'm getting an extended warranty for it, when all their past consoles have had drive problems. This is ridiculous, GTA4 and MGS4 especially are somehow damaging the drive on the PS3, GTA4 did so to mine. And the new PS3s with better drives lack the backwards compatibility my 60gb model had.

Their game division is one I am absolutely not happy with right now, their Vaios, I still love.

 

Wow. That is fantastic on HP's part.

Typical Sony. They always hit you hard when you need to send broken stuff to them for out-of-warranty service.

 

thanks for the help guys, i estimated the cost of replacing the mobo (which seems to be the only solution) and it comes to almost $1000!!!

this is insane! especially cause i am planning to get a Z series, but i still dont want to throw this one away

 

Maybe you get some money for it by selling the parts (on ebay for example).

Screen, harddrive, CPU, memory (maybe chassis with screen) should bring in some money.

 

this sucks, why does HP acknowledge this problem and sony not? this is so ridiculous, you such such a lot for a sony laptop and they dont care if it goes dead, even if its their fault! (or nvidia's)

 

Have you actually talked to Sony yet? Escalate this to a supervisor as soon as you can in the conversation. But be polite while doing so. Remember you will catch a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. This is especially true when dealing with tech support folks. They are so used to dealing with either folks who have no clue or ones who are irate that if you talk intelligently and calmly too them they usually respond very well.

Gary

 

yeap, just called them this morning, talked to the customer relations rep and the technical specialists, and they all said the same thing: sony does not acknowledge this issue

I was very polite and waited for over an hour on the phone.

 

In that case I would wait for more reports of similar faults to arrive. Unless you're very unlucky, it seems apparent from the Nvidia information we know that Sony will also have problems with this issue even if at the moment they can pretend it's limited to HP/Dell... so eventually they are likely to admit there's a problem and hopefully you'll get better results then?