nVidia In Hot Water Over Faulty Chips

Ever had one of your systems complete fail because of a faulty nVidia graphics card? As it turns out some of their cards are bad and can seriously overheat a system.

According to a story at the Inquirer, it's the G84 and G86 chips that have a problem. nVidia took a big financial write-off over the problem and now a New York law firm has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of shareholders, alleging that nVidia knew about the problem but kept it under wraps.

This doesn't precisely relate to a security problem, unless you consider the fact than overheated system could also crash a drive thereby causing you to lose your data.

In fact, I have 2 Dell laptops that experienced this exact problem, but with a different chipset. Those particular systems had the nVidia GeForce 7900 card in them, which I believe uses a G71 chipset. One of the systems became so hot that the plastic cover on top of the system actually warped due to the heat. The WiFi card was rendered inoperable as well. The other system simple stopped displaying video. I'm not sure who's at fault with this: Dell (for not providing an adequate BIOS to control heat) or nVidia. Either way there's no relief from either company for those problems.

Anyway, if you hold share in nVidia you might want to read the complaint filed against them