The extent of the problems plaguing Nvidia's graphics cards is still controversial, though the company has confirmed that "weak" materials have caused "higher-than-normal" fail rates in certain mobile GPUs, which appear to be the G84 and G86-based graphics cards. The Inquirer said those issues extended to the desktop as well, which Nvidia denied. Interestingly, VR-Zone is reporting that Nvidia has issued a product change notification to customers that they're changing the underfill material for their desktop G86 chips from Namics 8439-1 to Hitachi 3730. Could mean nothing, but since their original problems stemmed from "weak" materials, it stands out. Is there a non-conspiratorial reason they would do this? Update: Nvidia wrote us to respond to the rumors:
1) The issue is limited to a few notebook chips only; we have not seen and don't expect to see this issue on any NVIDIA based desktops 2) Only a very small percentage of the notebook chips that have shipped are potentially affected and the problem depends on a combination of environmental conditions, configuration and usage model 3) We continue to work closely with our partners and have taken the necessary steps to ensure that all NVIDIA chips currently in production do not exhibit the problem
[VR-Zone]