Sony Offers Free Repair for Notebooks with Defective NVIDIA GPUs

From DailyTech: NVIDIA is the second largest GPU maker in the world behind Intel. Intel leads the market because its GPUs are inside the vast majority of notebook and desktop computers with integrated graphics processors.

When notebooks offer discrete GPUs, things swing in favor of NVIDIA with its line of discrete notebook GPUs. In 2008, NVIDIA's GPUs were very popular additions to many different brands of notebook computers from Apple, HP, and Sony among others. NVIDIA ran into a bit of a problem when some of its GPUs started to fail at excessively high rates.

Apple, Dell, and HP all had GPUs that were defective, forcing wide scale replacements of parts. Sony has now added its name to the list of computer makers with defective NVIDIA GPUs in its notebooks. According to Sony, the defective GPUs may cause affected laptops to overheat and ultimately fail.

Symptoms of the GPU failure issue are distorted video, duplicate images, and blank screens. The GPU issue only applies to VAIO notebooks with NVIDIA GPUs in the VGN-AR1xx, VGN-AR2xx, VGN-AR3xx, VGN-FZ1xx, VGN-FZ2xx, VGN-FZ3xx, VGN-FZ4xx, VGC-LT1xx, and VGC-LT2xx models.

Sony will repair any laptop that is suffering from video issues relating to the GPU at no cost for parts or labor. The company is also extending the standard 12-month warranty on the notebooks to 36 months. The GPU failure is being cause by faulty material and thermal design in some laptops. PCWorld reports that NVIDIA took an additional $119.1 million charge during Q2 to help cover the costs of replacing the faulty GPUs.

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