Wednesday, August 27th 2008
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NVIDIA GPU Failures Caused by Material Problem, Sources Claim
NVIDIA has recently been experiencing higher-than-normal failure rates with some of its GPUs. Charlie Demerjian from The Inq. speculates that NVIDIA could actually have a much larger problem than what it admits to - it is quite possible, according to Demerjian, that not only mobile GPUs are affected, but the desktop G92 and G94 could also carry the fault.
The failures, some sources say, are caused by a solder bump that connects the I/O termination of the silicon chip to the pad on the substrate. In Nvidia's GPUs, this solder bump is created using high-lead. A thermal mismatch between the chip and the substrate has substantially grown in recent chip generations, apparently leading to fatigue cracking. What supports the theory that a high-lead solder bump in fact is at fault is the fact that Nvidia ordered an immediate switch to use eutectic solders instead of high-lead versions in the last week of July. Eutectic solders are believed to solve the problem of fatigue cracking.
Source:
TG Daily
The failures, some sources say, are caused by a solder bump that connects the I/O termination of the silicon chip to the pad on the substrate. In Nvidia's GPUs, this solder bump is created using high-lead. A thermal mismatch between the chip and the substrate has substantially grown in recent chip generations, apparently leading to fatigue cracking. What supports the theory that a high-lead solder bump in fact is at fault is the fact that Nvidia ordered an immediate switch to use eutectic solders instead of high-lead versions in the last week of July. Eutectic solders are believed to solve the problem of fatigue cracking.
11 Comments on NVIDIA GPU Failures Caused by Material Problem, Sources Claim
This is definately bad timing for Nvidia now that ATI has a nice set of cards with their 48xx series.
Glad to see they did something about it when they found out. Who made the original design Nvidia or the Fabs?
www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6753&Itemid=1
Might not be that far for 8800GTS 512MB. 8800GTS 320MB was released February 2007 and killed off (EOL) in October 2007. That comes just to 9 months lifetime and actual warranty was longer :)
(optimisms great, huh)