Mizipzor's Weblog

GPU problem (NVIDIA GeForce 9600M)

October 21, 2009 at 20:13 (Hardware) (GeForce 9600M, gpu, laptop, nvidia, zepto)

Just a few days since my laptop returned from repair it started to behave weird again. Graphical artifacts corrupted the screen beyond readability. Its been almost a year since I last did a clean wipe on it so I thought maybe now is the time. Grabbing a random rescue CD from the pile I quickly formatted the entire harddrive. After that, the Windows XP CD was inserted and I thought the computer wasnt far from being reborn. I was very wrong.

With a clean system, no artifacts were seen. But as soon as the GPU drivers were installed, the artifacts returned. Removing the drivers got rid of the artifacts. Below is a screenshot of a fresh install of Windows XP, no service pack, patches or updates, it doesnt even have an internet connection. Just the GPU drivers have been installed:

I kept juggling this for a while. Un-installing drivers in safe mode, installing them again, running various driver cleaning software and installing other versions of the driver. Nothing seemed to work. And note that (one version of) the failing drivers were the very ones supplied on the driver CD that I got with the laptop which I ran with, completely without problems, during the first few months.

Something was seriously broken here. A bit frustrated, I started googling. And troubling search results werent few and far between.

• A forum thread on Nvidias forum.
• Another thread with screenshots on the same forum.
• Horizontal lines when playing video – ACD 30″ and MacBook Pro 3.06 Unibody.
• Horizontal flickering lines on the screen.
• A post on Slashgear, talking about vertical lines.
• A thread with many screenshots. Very old though (2002).
• A post on CNET that talks about defective GPUs in Dell laptops.
• Heres a forum thread with many responders that claim to have defective GPUs.

Okay, so that glitch seems to have occurred since quite a while ago. But now for the real heavy weight! If you are to click any links or read anything through this post, let it be this one. Its a great, and long, post (on TheInquirer) detailing what seems to be a major cover up operation in the works by Nvidia to hide all the defective GPUs.

All the computers Ive bought over the years have used the Nvidia cards. But this problem and the resulting search results on Google have made me hesitate to go with them again. The main reason for buying the GeForce cards have been for the, actually quite good, Linux support. Time to check again now how ATI is doing on that front.

Im still waiting for my laptop to return from the service job. If it works when it gets back (that is, they dont simply blame Nvidia and send it back as is), and how well it works will be the real judge in this scenario.