The issues mostly involve flickering screens and could be graphics card-related. In any event, orders are now showing up as "shipping: two weeks" instead of the usual five to seven day period. [Computerworld]

The $1995 Matrox M9188 comes with 2GB of video RAM, and works with Windows 7, Vista, XP, and Linux. It can be combined with a second one to form a seamless desktop across 16 monitors. Apparently, this is perfect for "energy, transportation, process control, financial trading," and making your head explode. [Matrox]

Again, nothing's confirmed just yet, but preliminary testing has shown users who artificially set the MacBook Pro's cooling fan to 3,000rpm eliminate the screen burn-in issue we told you about earlier this week.

One MacBook Pro user, posting a reply in the Apple Support Forum, said the fans are intended to run at 2,000rpm until default conditions, and then spool up to 3,500 when high-temperature conditions kick in. You know, like what happens when you're using a GPU like the Nvidia 9600M.

That said, the MacBook Pro is having a little trouble getting it up, so to speak, and remains at about 2,050rpm when the temps rise to the point where the screen begins to flake out. That's bad.

What's good is this seems like a simple software fix, at least from the sound of this latest discussion. [Slashgear]

So a quick recap on the original issue and the back and forth between Nvidia and the Inquirer: Nvidia admitted back in July "significant quantities" of notebooks are defective, built and packaged with "weak" materials that are leading to them to overheat and fail at a "higher-than-normal" rate, but declined to state which cards specifically.

The Inquirer said every single G84 and G86 card was affected, and a GPU apocalypse was coming, and indeed, more and more models from different manufacturers came to light with the problem. The previous-gen MacBook Pro was actually the last one revealed to be smitten by the plague, like the final Cylon or something, since Nvidia was reportedly less-than-honest about the problem to Apple. Nvidia continued to reiterate most chips are just peachy.

Nvidia says that its current chips don't use the weak materials, which produce what are called "bad bumps." Obviously, the Inquirer thought they were lying, so they took a new MacBook Pro to a lab, cracked it open, sliced apart the G96 GPU and checked it out under a scanning electron microscope with an X-ray microanalysis system.

The result? The Inq says the same old bad bumps, which were composed mostly of lead, are there in the GeForce 9600 vs. the new, good eutectic bumps that are in the GeForce 9400M (the MacBook and MacBook Pro's chipset/integrated graphics). Or more straight up, "The 9600 is unquestionably using 'bad bumps', directly contradicting the statements from Nvidia...It suggests that there are 15-inch Macbook Pros being sold with 'bad bumps', the same materials that brought down so many HP, Dell and Apple parts, both laptop and desktop."

Naturally, I asked Nvidia for their reaction to Charlie's Inq piece, and a spokesperson reiterated that the GeForce 9600 GT graphics cards in the MacBook Pros "don't have bad bumps at all." He said that, "yes, they're lead bumps" but "hundreds of millions of chips have lead bumps." And it's "a different material set [from the faulty one], one they transferred to earlier" that's used in the 9400, 9600 and 9800.

Of course, the Inquirer's whole point is that Nvidia is lying. So, who to believe? Well, here's what we know for sure. When I talked to Nvidia about the original run of faulty chips, and why we saw it some systems and not others, they told me it was largely a thermal issue, which, in combination with the weak materials, would cause the kiss-of-death cracking—so you'd see it in systems that ran hot, in other words, like some notebooks or slimline desktops with poor circulation. (Which is why the "fix" for the problem were firmware updates that cranked the card's fans sooner.)

We further know that the 9600 GT cards in the MacBook Pro are currently having problems that appear to be heat-related, causing them to lock up and launch into the "black screen of death." Also, Nvidia pointed out that there aren't a whole lot of labs properly equipped to do the kind of analysis the Inquirer commissioned—you can't just walk down to your local Discovery Channel store—though they left it at that.

And that's about as definitive as we can get, for now. Two things bother us: We would've liked a slice and dice of one of the previous-gen bad chips to directly compare to the new, supposedly bad one. And Nvidia's subtle implication that the people with labs equipped to perform this kind of analysis have a vested interest in the outcome also has the magical effect of shielding them from the results.

You can believe Nvidia. You can believe the Inquirer. I just know that given the thermal problems that already clearly exist, I really hope the Inquirer is wrong. If you know something about this you wanna share, email me.

The Price: $329 for Business, $429 for Professional and $499 for Mac.

The Verdict: Multitasking bliss. We were able to add two 19-inch, 1280x1024 monitors to our 15-inch MacBook Pro without breaking a sweat. The two extra monitors (we were already running a 30-inch Dell off the internal DVI port) had very little slowdown while being powered through our ExpressCard port, and handled HD video like the Watchmen trailer without any signs of tears or imminent exploding.

What we did notice was that the unit was LOUD. In our pre-production unit, the fan ran started quietly on boot, but ramped up to 100% after a minute or two. It was loud enough to give us AND our unborn children a migraine. The people at Villagetronic said their release units would be softer, but note that the ATI 2600XT throws out a lot of heat. To us this means that you probably shouldn't expect this to be too much softer. Just something to watch out for if you need to use this in a quiet production environment. The other annoyance we've found is that the ExpressCard connection can't be hot-plugged on OS X, so you have to shut down your machine every time you want to swap in or out of the multi-monitor setup or else you'll get that curtain of death. Villagetronic tells us that it's a bug that Apple will fix in the future.

Is this great for multitasking? Oh sweet jeebus yes. You can have all your applications open at the same time, spread eagled across your four displays like Stalin planning to push the Nazis back into Germany (apologies for that undoubtedly historically inaccurate statement). Is it worth the as-of-yet-undetermined cost? Hard to say. Something like this won't be cheap, but if you're like us and value every pixel of your screen as if it's the last chopper out of Saigon (sorry again!), you'll look long and hard at the ViDock Gfx. [Villagetronic]

You'll have to connect the Luxium to its own power source, but in turn it lets you work with your favorite graphics card and offers USB and audio connectors. The Luxium just made its debut at Computex so there's no word yet on when it'll come out. – Louis Ramirez

MSI Shows External Graphics [TGDaily]
Images via TGDaily