18 Million Laptops Affected By Faulty Nvidia Graphics Chips? [UPDATED]

As I’ve reported on two occasions previously, Nvidia has had a major problem with the laptop versions of the 8400 and 8600 series graphics processors. Now some actual numbers are coming out about the number of laptops affected. The number is as many as 18 million. Where do I get this number from? Check out this Register story about the numbers and the costs involved. It’s a very interesting read.

Now say you’re HP or Dell or anybody else, what do you do? BIOS updates that turn the laptop fan on more frequently or permanently have been released by Dell and HP. Great. But all that means is that the graphics chip that fails because of overheating issues is cooled a bit more. Thus pushing the problem out until after the warranty expires, and at that point it becomes a source of revenue. Not only that, but that laptop is going to be really noisy.

As for Apple who uses these chipsets in the MacBook Pro line of notebooks, there’s ample evidence to indicate that they have issues as well. Curiously, Apple hasn’t come out with any sort of kludge fix of any sort like HP and Dell have. Therefore Apple laptop owners may be visiting the temple of Steve Apple Store Genius Bar in the near future for a repair. I hope they bought AppleCare.

All I have to ask is this, where does the queue for the forthcoming class action lawsuit begin? Because you know one is coming.

UPDATE: A MacBook Pro User sent an e-mail to “The Steve” on this issue and actually got a response claiming that he thinks the chips used in the MacBook Pro notebooks are fine.