Charlie over at the Inquirer hasn’t been on the best of terms with Nvidia for, oh, at least a year or so, it seems. So when he reports widespread Nvidia parts failures, he does it with an awful lot of gusto. That doesn’t, however, mean the story isn’t true. He now says Nvidia’s chip failures aren’t just confined to mobile GPUs, as the firm contends, but extend to desktop variants of the G84 and G86 and to the G92 and G94. If true, failures of those last two will affect PC enthusiasts quite a bit more than any G84/G86 failures, since the G92 and G94 are used on the GeForce 8800 GT, 8800 GTS 512MB, 9800 GTX, and 9600 GT, among others.
So the question is: Is it true? Are they failing at abnormally high rates? We could go back and forth with the Inq and Nvidia all day long collecting competing assertions and denials, but I figure we can gather some information ourselves, too, as we did with the IBM GXP fiasco. If the failures are really widespread, we should hear a lot about them, right?
So here’s the deal. If you have one of these Nvidia GPUs, please vote in our poll. If you’ve voted about a failure, please follow up by posting a comment explaining what failed on you and how.
This ain’t exactly science, but if something huge is happening, we ought to get a sense of it, I’d think. Let’s see what happens.
Update: Voting is now closed. Final results analysis is here.
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