Chips fail, students burned

By Alissa Souliere

soul0036@algonquincollege.com

With more laptop-mandatory programs at Algonquin and new technologies bursting onto the market, students are losing sleep and money over the engineering failures of the Nvidia chips. These new chips, put in almost every new laptop, have raised concern with their overheating issues that will cost students anywhere from $800 to $1,000 to fix once the warranty has expired. But Nvidia refuses to comment or provide any explanation as to why these chips will force students to buy new laptops before their program is over.
“The problem is extremely complex and defies a simple explanation. It involves multiple poor choices, multiple engineering failures, and likely a few bad accounting choices,” said Charlie Demerjian in a three-part series for The Inquirer online, a commonly-sourced site for multimedia technicians.
The Nvidia 55 and 65 nanometer chips are susceptible to massive overheating failures, which in turn will cause the motherboard to malfunction.
Most computer companies have claimed to know about the issue, but HP is the first source to come out with a patch. The sole problem is the patch can only help with the fan circulation to keep the computer cool. It will provide financial relief for the manufacturer, but won’t help students in the sense that it will push the problem out after the warranty has expired, said Demerjian.
“Sources close to Dell say they knew about the problem a year ago, and HP is on record as being aware in November, so there has been about a year to characterize the problem, design a solution and test it,” he said. “Multiple sources involved with package engineering tell us that this is not nearly enough time to do a proper test regime, much less long-term reliability studies.”
Tim Pickles, a first-year student in computer programming, hasn’t used one of the chips personally but said the problem will cause a lot of stress for students.
“From what I’ve heard, HP and other manufacturers are extending warranties for laptops with affected cards,” he said, “so it would be a wise idea not to get the patch; just run the laptop as hard as possible to see if it overheats and then let the warranty get you a new one.”
The chips will cause many problems for people who don’t know what the issue is. People who apply the patch will have decreased battery life, which will cause many more complaints, he added.
IT Support Specialist Mike Stacey said there are always issues with computers no matter what the circumstance, but the best way to minimize the problem would be to keep it clean.
“If people are only getting one year out these series of laptops, the best thing would be to keep it clean,” he said. “There are so many computers that come in here that are full of dust; no wonder the lifespan is minimized.”
Stacey said the new way of processing is to have a smaller and faster machine. Put together with these new chips, the money that will be lost due to overheating will be tremendous.
Stephen Abraham, chief information officer of ITS, was unavailable for comment by the Times publication date.
In retrospect, the choices made by Nvidia will cause a greater strain on student wallets compared to any other purchase they’ve made this year.
“The flaw is a downright idiotic choice of multiple materials coupled with poor chip design and inadequate testing,” said Demerjian. “It is a case of errors compounding errors. They are all defective.”