Sony Admits Issues with NVIDIA Chips in VAIO PC

Sony has finally admitted the graphics issues related to Nvidia chip that is believed to be impacting its VAIO series PC since last year. If you recall, Nvidia has officially acknowledged the defect due to its GPU (Graphics Processor unit) that being designed in most of the high end PC including Dell, HP and Apple, resulting in free repair and recall action from the manufacturers to calm down some of the end consumers.

However, Sony doesn’t seems to find any issue on its Vaio series after a thorough investigation together with Nvidia last year until the recent announcement. The potential defective graphics chips were believed to be built into 14 Sony Vaio laptop models and could cause graphics display issue, video distortion, blank screen and all sort of funny graphics related issues. The symptom occurrence will be more frequent if the system has been exposed to heat which is always a design challenge when trying to embed a powerful graphics chip into space constraint laptop casing. The root cause was confirmed by Nvidia to be due unreliable underfill material joining both the chip die to package that would crack overtime, which pose a serious reliability issue to end users.

No details on how many units were impacted but the Japanese company actually stated that only a small amount of computers were affected. Nevertheless, Sony will offer a free repair to those affected VAIO models up to four years since it was bought.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Desktop PC & Notebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.