Nvidia recommends not buying its defective chips

Bumpgate Told ya so
By Charlie Demerjian
Friday, 26 December 2008, 15:26
IT LOOKS LIKE Nvidia finally has a solution to the defective chips fiasco that it keeps covering up. The short story according to documents seen by VR-Zone is to not buy them, just buy the newer ones.
No, really, we're not kidding. To quote some of the latest memo, ".....NVIDIA strongly recommends that customers transition to this latest revision of the NB8E-SET GPUs as soon as possible. These latest revision units utilize "Hitachi" underfill packaging material that improves product quality and enhances operating life by improved thermal cycling reliability." We know what you are thinking, there is no problem with the chips, they said so. Many times. With a straight face.
Then again, we did say we believed otherwise. And then Nvidia denied it. And so we printed copies of the technical docs on the problem that we saw, note the part about Hitachi underfill and the date. And once again Nvidia denied it. We publicly mocked them, and so Nvidia spun harder. Whee, look! The shreds of the company's credibility are twitching!
Now Nvidia is urging it's partners to do what we said to do, not buy the defective parts, for the reasons we said. What a shock, it is almost like we understood what the problem was, even though they called everyone involved crazy. Luckily, Apple agrees with our version, read the knowledgebase neo-rant to see how that company feels. Sadly for Apple, it is not just confined to the old MacBooks, but the desktops as well, and likely continues into the shiny new unibody parts.
In the end, you can make up your own mind who to believe. From our point of view, this charade and cover-up has gone well past sad and on to pathetic. Nvidia needs to come clean on this, but is the company culturally capable of it? Sadly, no. Pathetic. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1...defective-chips